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CUSP
By Jocelyn Saidenberg Poems 2001 $10 ISBN: 0-932716-58-x
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CUSP by Jocelyn Saidenberg is the second winner of the Frances Jaffer Book Award. The subjects of Saidenberg's four extended prose poems are the innocent victims in wars of occupation: women, the "street dwellers," the working poor. She evaluates the radical dynamics of political revolutions with an eye to corrupting forces that can twist utopian agendas: "we resorted to walking again resemblances of an armory of thoughts. ill thoughts. a false bottom. armory of weapons. ill weapons . . . "
Judgements slip through consciousness at high speeds; moral systems are porous; and the poems' lines are thickly punctuated and fragmented. Underlying Saidenberg's broken surfaces, a balancing mind meditates on justice and mercy, responsibility and freedom. The complexity of these pieces is written into a haunting music: "else she can never twice born twice bloodied born bloodied;" "caveway caveway wayward home."
Barbara Guest writes: "CUSP is a poem of exceptional sensibility and ardor."
Read Jocelyn Saidenberg's bio.