Stet: Poems (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets)

Review\n"In Stet, Dora Malech adds a stiff dose of emotional urgency to formal experiment, finding in anagrams, erasures, and Oulipean constraints like the 'beautiful outlaw' a way to advance a continual re-interpretation of deeply felt content. . . . Malech’s effort . . . foregrounds the beauty and power of what form―and the willingness to follow it without knowing the end result―can achieve."---Marcella Durand, Hyperallergic\n"[Stet] is a package of dynamite that could go off at any moment―combustible words that separate and come together like a gorgeous debris. They tweak the page with hidden truths made of language and utterances that are puzzle solvers―but what is the puzzle? Perhaps dimensionality on the page that speaks only if you want it. . . . Some pages are electro-pop, some are written by a spirit animal, but Malech’s got pipes, and by God they sing."---Grace Cavalieri, Washington Independent Review of Books\n"The poems in Stet often contain a forward and backward movement enacted through language play. In [Malech's] use of anagrams and rhymes, her subtle transpositions of letters from one word to the next . . . she lays bare the process of figuring out what to tell and how to tell it, especially at times when language fails us most. . . . It is play with a purpose, because between the words and white space, 'Sometimes we step into something true.'"---Maya Phillips, American Poets\n"In this collection, we see a poet playing with language, cavorting with words and meanings that continue cascading into something else, something new, always metamorphosizing. This sense of play has value: Malech demonstrates her love and admiration for language as she shares poems that are playful, that are musical, and that make us think about words as arrangements of symbols that we ultimately assign meaning to. These poems remind us that poems do not always have to have a clear narrative, and their value is not necessarily in their decipherability."---Despy Boutris, Gulf Coast Magazine\n"[A] smart, at times pyrotechnic collection―she structures many of her lines with anagram―that is, like all great poetry, a joy to read aloud."---Spencer Hupp, Sewanee Review\n"I was half amazed, half inspired, fully captivated by Malech’s form. Reading this book exposed me to a type of writing I hadn’t considered before, one that sets its own boundaries and breaks them all within one poem."---Sarah Sham, Crashtest\nA fascinating collection of serious and playful poems that tap the inventive possibilities of the anagram and other constraining forms\nIn Stet, poet Dora Malech takes constraint as her catalyst and subject, exploring what it means to make or break a vow, to create art out of a life in flux, to reckon with the body’s bounds, and to arrive at a place where one might bear and care for another life. Tapping the inventive possibilities of constrained forms, particularly the revealing limitations of the anagram, Stet is a work of serious play that brings home the connections and intimacies of language.\n“Stet,” from the Latin for “let it stand,” is a proofreading term meaning to retain or return to a previous phrasing. The uncertainty of changes made and then reconsidered haunts Stet as its poems explore what is left unsaid through erasures, redaction, and the limitations of spelling. How does one “go back” on one’s word or “stand by” one’s decisions? Can a life be remade or revised, or is the past forever present as in a palimpsest? Embodying the physicality and reproductive potentiality inherent in the collection’s forms and figures, Stet ends expectantly, not searching for closure but awaiting the messy, living possibilities of what comes next.\nBy turns troubling and consoling, Stet powerfully combines lyric invention and brilliant wordplay.

Literature & Fiction

Malech, Dora

United States

Princeton University Press

A fascinating collection of serious and playful poems that tap the inventive possibilities of the anagram and other constraining forms
In Stet, poet Dora Malech takes constraint as her catalyst and subject, exploring what it means to make or break a vow, to create art out of a life in flux, to reckon with the body’s bounds, and to arrive at a place where one might bear and care for another life. Tapping the inventive possibilities of constrained forms, particularly the revealing limitations of the anagram, Stet is a work of serious play that brings home the connections and intimacies of language.
“Stet,” from the Latin for “let it stand,” is a proofreading term meaning to retain or return to a previous phrasing. The uncertainty of changes made and then reconsidered haunts Stet as its poems explore what is left unsaid through erasures, redaction, and the limitations of spelling. How does one “go back” on one’s word or “stand by” one’s decisions? Can a life be remade or revised, or is the past forever present as in a palimpsest? Embodying the physicality and reproductive potentiality inherent in the collection’s forms and figures, Stet ends expectantly, not searching for closure but awaiting the messy, living possibilities of what comes next.
By turns troubling and consoling, Stet powerfully combines lyric invention and brilliant wordplay.

In Flourish, multiple meanings catch light--as the leaves of growing things might, or the facets of cut gemstones, or a signal mirror flashing in distress. These poems explore themes of thriving, growth, innovation, and survival, while immersing the reader in the pleasures of language itself--the "flourish" of linguistic gesture, play, form, turn, and adornment. Here, the lens zooms in and out to micro and macro levels, asking us to see the familiar with new eyes. The collection engages with the materials of the worlds we inhabit--natural worlds and those of our own making--and a full spectrum of poetry's own materials, building worlds of words and illuminating the shadowed terrain of our interior landscapes as well.

Flourish (Carnegie Mellon University Press Poetry Series)

Poetry

Carnegie-Mellon University Press

Poetry. The poems in SAY SO are at once rigorously formal and wildly experimental. Human utterance—be it prayer or plea or pun or turn of phrase or epithet—is one of SAY SO's primary pistons; poetic tradition—rhyme, meter, form, rhetoric—is another; the beauty and betrayals of the body, or bodies—echoed in the beauty and betrayal of language itself—is a third. Together, these forces provide the pressure that makes SAY SO move and brings these poems to life.

Say So (New Poetry)

Cleveland State University Poetry Center

Poetry. By turns playful and serious, the poems in Dora Malech's long-awaited second collection, SHORE ORDERED OCEAN, revel in the inherent tensions and pleasures of sense, sound and syntax, reveal the resonance in the offhand utterance, seek the unexpected in aphorism and cliché, and tap into the paradoxical freedom of formality. This is an extraordinary collection of highly idiosyncratic poems which explores place, politics, the body, love, art, and more. It is bound together by an urgent, physical and beguiling relationship with language itself. "These are wonderful poems. Dora Malech knows just about everything there is to know about the risky music that lives in language. But she also knows about Truth and Beauty. She's far too wise to try and make these last two rhyme, but she constantly tempts them into conversation."—Bill Manhire "If you'd wondered where the dappled things had gone, how the tisket and tasket ended up, what the fickle, freckled, couple-colored pieces of life were up to, look no further. Dora Malech has woven them into her exuberant debut. And she's stuck in too the x-rays of Zeus and the horns of Moses. SHORE ORDERED OCEAN is by turns witty and wonderstruck, fragile and fierce. Best of all, it announces an extraordinary talent to be watched and cherished."—J. D. McClatchy "Inquiring, irreverent, reverent, enraptured, Dora Malech is that rare thing, the magician technician, and she has written a book in which a sudden segue in poetry takes place—from Hopkins to the present. The result is as breathtaking as a dove release. She knows every word in the world is a book, that every center sought and found is continually thrown off, that the muscular is fragile and vice-versa, yet none of her old soul knowledge is ponderous, predictable, or dull, for she remains in love with that essential playfulness which is the innocence of art. Here is Malech on the birth of a child: '...unfold all / those origami limbs to test / the inevitable debutante bawl.' This book is an astonishing debut, one that makes me feel our original, lost language has found its way home."—Mary Ruefle

Shore Ordered Ocean

The Waywiser Press

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Books by Malech, Dora

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Malech, Dora. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Stet: Poems (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets)

Stet: Poems (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets)

Flourish (Carnegie Mellon University Press Poetry Series)

Say So (New Poetry)

Shore Ordered Ocean