New & Selected Poems, 1961-1996 - Tapa blanda

Poetry. "Although well known as a playwright, Owens is yet another talented poet who has not received her due because her poems are neither easy nor easily classifiable. Owens is, firstly, a political poet. She presents readers with reconstructed and sometimes wholly imagined 'historical' events in an attempt to expose what she feels has been neglected or overlooked. Thus in 'Luca: Discourse on Life and Death,' Owens's most recent (and most accomplished) work, the reader is confronted with an extensive investigation of Leonardo da Vinci's atelier during the composition of Mona Lisa. Both the artistic processes and the human relationships involved are dissected in writing that is playfully anachronistic and critically insightful"—Publishers Weekly. "In its uncompromising savagery, its passionate rejection of sentimentality, Rochelle Owens's lyric voice is unique among contemporary poets. An astonishing body of work"—Marjorie Perloff.

Rochelle Owens is the author of seventeen collections of poetry, including SOLITARY WORKWOMAN, LUCA: DISCOURSE ON LIFE AND DEATH, and NEW AND SELECTED POEMS 1961-1996 (all three Junction Press); nineteen plays, collected in Futz and What Came After (Random House), The Karl Marx Play and Others (E.P. Dutton), Futz and Who Do You Want Piere Vidal? (Hawkswell Press and Broadway Play Publishing), and Plays by Rochelle Owens: Chucky's Hunch, Futz, Kontraption, Three Front (Broadway Play Publishing); the screenplay for Futz (United Commonwealth Films); and the novel Journey to Purity (Texture Press). She translated Liliane Atlan's The Passersby (Henry Holt) and edited Spontaneous Combustion: Eight New American Plays (Winter House).