WIN $150 GIFT VOUCHERS: ALADDIN'S GOLD

Close Notification

Your cart does not contain any items

Granny Cloud

Farnoosh Fathi

$29.99

Paperback

Not in-store but you can order this
How long will it take?

QTY:

English
NYRB Poets
22 October 2024
A playful, ecstatic, and invigorating collection of lyrical work by one of America's finest young poets.

In Granny Cloud, Farnoosh Fathi presents poetry as the pursuit of one's highest attention, of freedom in formlessness, and joy in surrender. Like the dispirited court tumbler in the French medieval legend said to have inspired St. Francis's eponymous ""Jongleurs de Dieu"" who takes up a daily ritual of tumbling on his hands in a dark cave before a portrait of the Virgin Mary, Fathi renews our faith in the lyric imagination through wild headstands and handsprings of impishly erotic language ""soiled in fecal rhymes."" The title of her book links to both the progressive cloud-based educational program in India and the ""grandmaternal mind"" in Zen Buddhism-a mind that is tender, equanimous, and free to be absorbed by everything one encounters. Iterations of lines tumble from poem to poem through repeated portraits of home and children, peas and baldness, worms, spiders, and snails that collect in a salivating grand cloud of lyric reinvention. The cave of her own lyric process is foregrounded in the long poem of the third and last section ""Anyone's Don'tanelle"" which tracks the drafts and do-overs of the writing of the poem ""Fontanelle,"" that appears in the first section. In poem after poem, Granny Cloud raises a stained-glass popsicle to whatever inner chariot that carries the lyric spark through the ecstatic housekeeping of the word.
By:  
Imprint:   NYRB Poets
Country of Publication:   United States
Dimensions:   Height: 178mm,  Width: 114mm, 
Weight:   369g
ISBN:   9781681378596
ISBN 10:   1681378590
Pages:   128
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Farnoosh Fathi is the author of Great Guns (Canarium, 2013), the editor of Joan Murray: Drafts, Fragments, and Poems (NYRB, 2018), and the founder of the Young Artists Language and Devotion Alliance (YALDA). She lives and teaches in New York.

Reviews for Granny Cloud

"""Specializing in moments of linguistic collision, Fathi, in just a few deft syllables, can trigger a riot of associations and sonic improvisations that extend beyond the ironic, beyond belletristic distractions, into the nuanced tonal inflections of a self and culture auscultated."" —Christine Hume, Boston Review ""Farnoosh Fathi is looking for a most vulgar self-satisfaction in writing… 'What others rule operatic was for me finally accurate!'; 'My legs espalier'; 'No one who means it knows it.' The comparisons are discontent. These are horological poems. They appeal to life’s cycles—to Fathi's own greatness."" —Corina Copp   ""Poetry, like the humours, like the soul, can be grasped only when its exuberance exceeds the body. Granny Cloud is that exuberance, thus illustrating the impossibility of finding form. This book is the Tower of Babel for our generation! The poems wander off the page, and walk, as Saint Francis did, to call to birds."" —Darcie Dennigan    ""Ah, 'what have I done in my able meter?,' a drily dismayed Farnoosh Fathi asks herself. A jubilant lot, I’d say... Poetry too radically rambunctious, too linguistically lubricious to be defined by even her, let alone by this admiring ‘ogre kissing guesses’—who can, however, declare enthusiastically that she deserves as wide an audience as possible, especially among the extravagant."" —Stephen Yenser"


See Also