General Grant National Memorial - Books
The Face: A Novella in Verse
 David St. John
 From the Publisher:
David St. John is among the most innovative and accomplished poets writing today. In crafting The Face, a daring book-length sequence of poems, he has created a highly original novella in verse. The poems evoke the disintegration of a man as he confronts the failure of love and descends into a hellish dark night of the soul. They explore the drama of the shattered self in a variety of voices, calling on memory to speak and imagination to make beauty from the shards. Slowly the speaker reassembles his life and finds a new faith in himself and in the world. David St. John’s poems reveal a swirling cinematic poetry of visionary scope — meditative and confessional in some moments, ironic and playful in others. Deeply passionate and raw in its candor, The Face may be for this generation of poets what Robert Lowell’s Life Studies and John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror were for theirs.About the AuthorDavid St. John has been honored with many of the most significant prizes for poets, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, both the Rome Fellowship in Literature and an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the O. B. Hardison Jr. Prize from The Folger Shakespeare Library, and a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation. He teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
From The Critics:
Publishers WeeklySt. John’s ninth collection is roughly plotted around a midlife crisis: "Each day, in the mirror, that face smeared a bit more brutally- Across the glass." In order to push the narcissism to its limits, St. John confronts his speaker with a forthcoming biopic of his own life, complete with poor scripting by an ex-, "Infanta," and a young cinematographer "with a pierced dick." Fuguing around writing process-oriented repetitions of "assembling" and "dissembling," the speaker utters an Eliotic cri de coeur ("I have invented a whole philosophy of shatterings"), complains about the script ("That tapestry of travesty") and alternately fantasizes about and feels revulsion for the "hot" young woman cast to play him, with "a certain angel-butch Joan-of-Arcish kind of thing." September 11, as a key recent event in the speaker’s life, is presented as a set piece with "flakes of flint falling- Through long fingers of flame. Black leaves. Feuilles de noire." Faulty cell phone communication, straight talk on cultural decline ("remind us why anyone gives a shit, OK?") and a lengthy diversionary prose poem listing varieties of masks follow, until, at the premiere of the movie of his life, the speaker "hurls," crawls outside and sees a vision of his own face assemble in the sky. Despite some entertainingly arch moments (on literary couples: "all that flesh made word") and anecdotes of self-abnegation, most readers will have put it together and walked out long before that. (Apr.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information. Library JournalThough dubbed a novella, St. John’s eighth volume of poetry is less a narrative than a phantasmagoric dream diary or extended dramatic monolog. The speaker is a Hollywood jet-setter who’s lost his (or perhaps her) sense of identity and strives to recapture it through a series of fevered meditations on past loves and exotic travels, waxing metaphorical on "the fluent confetti of the soul...a self- Assembled like the mosaic of a mask, the whole of that self assembled of light." The narrator repeatedly bemoans his fractured persona ("The Cubist me I’ll carry out into the world"), yearning to "unclench that final personal pronoun." St. John’s expansive, barely lineated prose brims with color, motion, and a cinematographer’s sense of mise-en-sc ne, but the cloying self-centeredness of the speaker ("The real, the vital and gloriously broken me") and the vagueness of his melodramatic torment fail to earn sympathy. This work functions well enough as a satire of the movie world’s self-importance in a media-obsessed age, but that seems too broad a target for St. John’s eloquence and verve. While angst abounds, it ricochets in a hermetic chamber all its own. For comprehensive collections only.-Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Our Price: $24.95
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Face: A Novella in Verse
 David St. John
 From the Publisher:
David St. John is among the most innovative and accomplished poets writing today. In crafting The Face, a daring book-length sequence of poems, he has created a highly original novella in verse. The poems evoke the disintegration of a man as he confronts the failure of love and descends into a hellish dark night of the soul. They explore the drama of the shattered self in a variety of voices, calling on memory to speak and imagination to make beauty from the shards. Slowly the speaker reassembles his life and finds a new faith in himself and in the world. David St. John’s poems reveal a swirling cinematic poetry of visionary scope — meditative and confessional in some moments, ironic and playful in others. Deeply passionate and raw in its candor, The Face may be for this generation of poets what Robert Lowell’s Life Studies and John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror were for theirs.About the AuthorDavid St. John has been honored with many of the most significant prizes for poets, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, both the Rome Fellowship in Literature and an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the O. B. Hardison Jr. Prize from The Folger Shakespeare Library, and a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation. He teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
From The Critics:
Publishers WeeklySt. John’s ninth collection is roughly plotted around a midlife crisis: "Each day, in the mirror, that face smeared a bit more brutally- Across the glass." In order to push the narcissism to its limits, St. John confronts his speaker with a forthcoming biopic of his own life, complete with poor scripting by an ex-, "Infanta," and a young cinematographer "with a pierced dick." Fuguing around writing process-oriented repetitions of "assembling" and "dissembling," the speaker utters an Eliotic cri de coeur ("I have invented a whole philosophy of shatterings"), complains about the script ("That tapestry of travesty") and alternately fantasizes about and feels revulsion for the "hot" young woman cast to play him, with "a certain angel-butch Joan-of-Arcish kind of thing." September 11, as a key recent event in the speaker’s life, is presented as a set piece with "flakes of flint falling- Through long fingers of flame. Black leaves. Feuilles de noire." Faulty cell phone communication, straight talk on cultural decline ("remind us why anyone gives a shit, OK?") and a lengthy diversionary prose poem listing varieties of masks follow, until, at the premiere of the movie of his life, the speaker "hurls," crawls outside and sees a vision of his own face assemble in the sky. Despite some entertainingly arch moments (on literary couples: "all that flesh made word") and anecdotes of self-abnegation, most readers will have put it together and walked out long before that. (Apr.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information. Library JournalThough dubbed a novella, St. John’s eighth volume of poetry is less a narrative than a phantasmagoric dream diary or extended dramatic monolog. The speaker is a Hollywood jet-setter who’s lost his (or perhaps her) sense of identity and strives to recapture it through a series of fevered meditations on past loves and exotic travels, waxing metaphorical on "the fluent confetti of the soul...a self- Assembled like the mosaic of a mask, the whole of that self assembled of light." The narrator repeatedly bemoans his fractured persona ("The Cubist me I’ll carry out into the world"), yearning to "unclench that final personal pronoun." St. John’s expansive, barely lineated prose brims with color, motion, and a cinematographer’s sense of mise-en-sc ne, but the cloying self-centeredness of the speaker ("The real, the vital and gloriously broken me") and the vagueness of his melodramatic torment fail to earn sympathy. This work functions well enough as a satire of the movie world’s self-importance in a media-obsessed age, but that seems too broad a target for St. John’s eloquence and verve. While angst abounds, it ricochets in a hermetic chamber all its own. For comprehensive collections only.-Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
List Price: $$13.95 Our Price: $12.55
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Unveiling of the National Icons: A Plea for Patriotic Iconoclasm in a Nationalist Era
 Albert Boime
 From the Publisher:
In The Unveiling of the National Icons, Albert Boime analyzes the creation and reception of several American national monuments as a means of understanding the politics of memory and national icons. In engaging, behind the scenes accounts of several highly visible symbols, such as the American flag, the Statue of Liberty, and Mount Rushmore, among others, he demonstrates how these icons have been manipulated for patriotic purposes. Examining these symbols as a group for the first time, this book is also the first serious investigation of visual artifacts that are too often taken for granted.
From The Critics:
William E. Leuchtenburg - New York Times Book Review . . .Boime. . .indulges in psychological speculation that not everyone will find credible. . . .These rhetorical excesses are regrettable, for Boime is undeniably correct in saying that national icons often arise from self-interest and are meant to convey political messages. William E. Leuchtenburg. . .Boime. . .indulges in psychological speculation that not everyone will find credible. . . .These rhetorical excesses are regrettable, for Boime is undeniably correct in saying that national icons often arise from self-interest and are meant to convey political messages. -- The New York Times Book Review
List Price: $$95.00 Our Price: $90.25
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