Difficult Ornaments: Florida and the Poets

Literature & Fiction

Mlinko, Ange

History & Criticism

Oxford University Press

A vibrant and eclectic collection from a stunningly mature young poet 
"The world―the time has come to say it, though the news will not be welcome to everyone―has no intention of abandoning enchantment altogether." Roberto Calasso's words in Literature and the Gods remind us that, in an age of reason, of mechanization, of alienation, of rote drudgery, we still seek out the transcendent, the marvelous. Ange Mlinko's luminous fourth collection is both a journey toward and the space of that very enchantment. Marvelous Things Overheard takes its title from a collection of ancient rumors about the lands of the Mediterranean. Mlinko, who lived at the American University of Beirut and traveled to Greece and Cyprus, has penned poems that seesaw between the life lived in those ancient and strife-torn places, and the life imagined through its literature: from The Greek Anthology to the Mu'allaqat. Throughout, Mlinko grapples with the passage of time on two levels: her own aging (alongside the growing up of her children) and the incontrovertible evidence of millennia of human habitation. This is an assured and revealing collection, one that readers will want to seek refuge in again and again.

Marvelous Things Overheard: Poems

Poetry

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

In Distant Mandate, Ange Mlinko moves between the tormented southern landscape, with its alternately arid and flooded scrublands, and the imaginative landscapes of Western art. Guided by her spiritual forbears―Orpheus, Mallarmé, Pound, Yeats, and others―Mlinko deftly places herself within the tradition of the poet in protest against the obduracy of the real.
Mlinko takes the title from a piece by Laszló Krasznahorkai on the unknowable origins of the Alhambra, the monument “for the sight of which there is only a distant mandate . . . [one] can see, in any event, the moment of creation of the world, of course all the while understanding nothing of it.” This distant mandate, also the “bitter ideal” of Mallarmé, is the foundation upon which all works of art are composed―the torment of eros and the intimation of war. 
Myth is central to these poems; some are based on the story Cupid and Psyche, others serve as odes to Aphrodite or as explorations of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. In Distant Mandate, Mlinko has given us a shimmering and vibrant collection, one that shows us not only how literature imagines itself through life but also how life reimagines itself through literature.

Distant Mandate: Poems

About the Author\nAnge Mlinko is the author of several books of poetry, including Distant Mandate and Marvelous Things Overheard. She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Randall Jarrell Award for Criticism, and served as Poetry Editor for The Nation. Her essays and reviews have been published in The Nation, The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, and Parnassus. Educated at St. John’s College and Brown University, she has lived abroad in Morocco and Lebanon, and is currently Professor of English at the University of Florida. She lives in Gainesville.\nAnge Mlinko alchemizes art and life into a dazzling collection of poetry in Venice\nIn Venice, Ange Mlinko dissolves the boundaries between the sublime and the ordinary, the mythic and the rational, the past and the present. She sees a Roman tablet, scratched with Greek script, in the waxen wings of a bouffant bee, and she thinks of the abyss between two airport terminals when considering Rodin’s Gates of Hell. From Naples, Italy, to its sister city on the Gulf of Mexico, or at home, in the glow of a computer screen (“I worry / that Zoom is ruled by djinn / that filter out the wavelength of love / and so I wear my evil eye jewelry, // as you advised, against being too /much in view . . .”), Mlinko probes the etymologies and eccentricities of all she encounters. As Dan Chiasson wrote in The New Yorker, “Her extraordinary wit, monitoring its own excesses, is her compass.”\nOn her travels, Mlinko scrapes at the patina of the past and considers the line between destruction and preservation. Sparking with wit and intelligence, the poet’s own lines break down and remake language, myth, and time. Mlinko is a poet of art and of life, and Venice is a sumptuous exploration of poetry’s capacity to capture the miracles and ironies of our times.

Venice: Poems

Ange Mlinko alchemizes art and life into a dazzling collection of poetry in Venice In Venice, Ange Mlinko dissolves the boundaries between the sublime and the ordinary, the mythic and the rational, the past and the present. She sees a Roman tablet, scratched with Greek script, in the waxen wings of a bouffant bee, and she thinks of the abyss between two airport terminals when considering Rodin's Gates of Hell. From Naples, Italy, to its sister city on the Gulf of Mexico, or at home, in the glow of a computer screen ("I worry / that Zoom is ruled by djinn / that filter out the wavelength of love / and so I wear my evil eye jewelry, // as you advised, against being too /much in view . . ."), Mlinko probes the etymologies and eccentricities of all she encounters. As Dan Chiasson wrote in The New Yorker, "Her extraordinary wit, monitoring its own excesses, is her compass." On her travels, Mlinko scrapes at the patina of the past and considers the line between destruction and preservation. Sparking with wit and intelligence, the poet's own lines break down and remake language, myth, and time. Mlinko is a poet of art and of life, and Venice is a sumptuous exploration of poetry's capacity to capture the miracles and ironies of our times.

Venice

FSG Adult

Poetry. AN INSTANCE is the first in an occasional series from Instance Press collecting new chapbooks from multiple authors in a single volume. AN INSTANCE contains "Hotel Lazuli" by Ange Mlinko, "Which Is Exhibited" by Jesse Seldess, and "St. Ursula's Silence" by Barbara Claire Freeman.

An Instance: Three Chapbooks

Freeman, Barbara Claire

Seldess, Jesse

Instance Press

“A fine-grained light like that of a nineteenth-century Danish landscape painting shimmers throughout these gorgeously tactile and tactful poems.”—John Ashbery
“A heady heady brew—O’Hara conversation, Ashbery sophistication, Koch hilarity, Schuyler shapeliness, Guest adventures, Notley grain, Mayer utopia, Padgett whimsy, Oulipo oofs.”—Bob Holman, National Poetry Series judge
Mlinko was hailed by Publishers Weekly as “one of the most exciting American poets under 40.” Her Starred Wire reaches across continents of language where, as in Borges, dream logic dictates an interactive, delirious exploration of art and childhood, place and possibility.
Author of Matinées, Ange Mlinko lives in Brooklyn with her husband and young son.

Starred Wire (National Poetry Series Books (Paperback))

United States

Coffee House Press

“In Ange Mlinko’s Shoulder Season observation and metaphor are always on edge. . . . The poems are at once formally engaged, playful, and disturbing. It’s a wild ride and a great read.”—Rae Armantrout
With a title that plays upon “shouldering” one’s burden, this equally fanciful and hard-hitting collection captures the uncertainties and economic turmoil of twenty-first-century life, where the mind might still be “a little spa,” but the future “is hedged against the / boys who died.”
A longtime East Coast resident and language columnist for The Nation, Ange Mlinko currently lives in Beirut. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, Poetry, and elsewhere.

Shoulder Season

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

Books by Mlinko, Ange

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

Difficult Ornaments: Florida and the Poets

Marvelous Things Overheard: Poems

Distant Mandate: Poems

Marvelous Things Overheard: Poems

Distant Mandate: Poems

Venice: Poems

Venice

An Instance: Three Chapbooks

Starred Wire (National Poetry Series Books (Paperback))

Shoulder Season