Information desk : an epic / Robyn Schiff.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Schiff, Robyn, author.

Series:

Penguin poets

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.)--Poetry.

Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.).

Coming of age--Poetry.

Coming of age.

Genre:

Poetry.

Epic poetry.

Physical Description:

125 pages ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

[New York, New York] : Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, [2023]

Summary:

"From an acclaimed and wildly imaginative poet, a book-length poem set in the Metropolitan Museum of Art that is a work of art history and a coming-of-age story. Robyn Schiff's fourth collection is an ambitious book-length poem in three parts set at The Metropolitan Museum of Art's information desk, where Schiff long ago held a staff position. Elaborately mapping an interconnected route in and out of the museum through history, material, and memory, Information Desk: An Epic takes us on an anguished soul-quest and ecstatic intellectual query to confront the violent forces that inform the museum's encyclopedic collection and the spiritual powers of art. Novelistic in its sweep, frantically informative, and deeply intimate in its private recollections, Information Desk: An Epic wayfares with riveting lyric intensity through an epic array of topics and concerns, including illusion, deception, self-deception, complicity, lecherous coworkers, the composition of pigment, the scattering of seeds, ideas, and capital, and insect infestations spreading within artwork. Along the way, Schiff pauses to invoke three terrifying muses-parasitic wasps-in desperate awe of their powers of precision and generative energy. Information Desk: An Epic undertakes a hemorrhaging ekphrastic journey through artifice and the natural world"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Invocation: To the jewel wasp

Part 1

Invocation: To the oak gall wasp

Part 2

Invocation: To the cuckoo paper wasp

Part 3.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references.

Other Format:

Online version: Schiff, Robyn. Information desk

ISBN:

9780143136804

0143136801

OCLC:

1354648444