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Open Books: Event Archive
May 01, 2007 07:30 PM
GLENN MOTT
Though he now lives in Brooklyn, for several years in the 1990s Glenn Mott
lived and worked in Shanghai. His collection Analects on a Chinese Screen
($16 Chax) is an alternately impressionistic and journalistic rendering both
of contemporary China and of the visiting outsider, a "revenant stranger, /
in an enormous night." Thoughtful and candid, the poems and brief prose
pieces investigate the territory of the self as well as that of this ancient
and rapidly changing country -- "In written Chinese it is impossible to
forget that personality once meant, not the soul, but the soul's mask." Some
of the writing draws on traditional (even stereotypical) Chinese imagery and
re-envisions it, as in these lines from the poem "Menu" -- "Three kinds of
twilight... / Cross-section slabs of Jurassic ammonite with plum sauce... /
Lassitude with wet noodle." At times dryly humorous, at other times
touching, the book is a contemplation of the cultural, social, psychological
being.
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