The Cold War
100 Best Books of 2011, Publishers Weekly 2011 Notable Books, Academy of American Poets From the powerful drama and formal boldness of "The Status Seekers" to the various theories of criticism in "The Nervousness of Yvor Winters," Kathleen Ossip's second collection takes up the crazed threads of modern experience and all its contradictions. Each poem, each new approach is an attempt to extract something concrete from an era not yet past. Yet as the poet probes and wonders, she gradually reveals another narrative, built on strangled emotion and subdued lyricism. The Cold War is jagged and thought-provoking. It questions the origins and premises of contemporary American culture.
Kathleen Ossip: Kathleen Ossip is the author of The Search Engine, which was selected by Derek Walcott for the APR/Honickman First Book Prize and nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and of Cinephrastics, a chapbook of movie poems. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, The Washington Post, Fence, The Believer, and Poetry Review (London). She teaches at The New School in New York, where she is Editor-at-Large for LIT, and the Poetry Editor of Women’s Studies Quarterly. Ossip was born and raised in Albany, New York, in a large Italian-Irish family, and now lives outside of New York City with her husband and daughter.
