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| How pleasant to be let in on a young woman's mornings as she leaves behind the night and finds her way into a new day! Sometimes she's still full of dreams and/or vodka or some mysterious honeycomb leaving behind its sweetness as it flees, and sometimes she's preternaturally lucid and filled with resolve. The days stretch before her hopeful and intriguing and fetchingly unknown. Wanda Phipps's poems restored the world briefly into the unbearable longing and clarity of youth, and this old grump wept. Very tonic, very lovely, poetry, definitely. —Andrei Codrescu, author of it was today: new poems |
| Wanda Phipps's new book gracefully navigates an expedition through interrupted dreams, soft-focus adventures and the rush hour that often occurs between four walls. Slightly hazy, sometimes hormonal, these poems entice the reader into imagining what's really going on--between the lines. A truly beautiful and inspiring work. —Gillian McCain, coauthor of Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk |
| Wanda Phipps, who's written 66 direct poems on mornings in the tradition of chinese classical poetry, the poetry of everyday life, reminds me that as an anarchist I will miss my kidnaper. I also learned that her boyfriend has a purple haze manic panic streak. now you have poems to read for 66 mornings; after that you'll have to write them, and, in the best tradition, Wanda teaches you how. Brava! —Bernadette Mayer |
| Wanda Phipps's series of poems is an extended meditation on what it feels like to be herself in the first light of day. As the catalyst, she writes, 'for everyone but myself,' she is by turns insatiable, hungover, hung-up, elusive, unguarded, wistful, and in love with everything. Reading this book is like getting a wake-up call from the beyond. All the fleeting early morning side trips are preserved here forever. —Lewis Warsh |
| She has the dubious distinction of being my favorite poet. She can walk the walk and talk the talk and that's no cakewalk. —Todd Colby, author of Riot in the Charm Factory and Tremble & Shine | |
Wake-Up Calls
66 Morning Poems
Wanda Phipps
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| Paper | 5 1/2 x 7 | 80 pgs. | ISBN: 1-932360-31-X | List: $13.95 | 07/1/2004 |
Available on Powells.com, Amazon.com, from your local BookSense store, and bookstores everywhere!
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About the book: Over the course of several months, Wanda Phipps composed a poem each morning after she awoke. Wake-Up Calls collects the best from her poem-a-day experiment. She investigates the hypnogogic state, that weird and wonderful place that holds bits of dreams of the night before, recent and not so recent memories, and subtle visions for the future. In many, she wakes feeling fresh-faced and dreamy, in others her voice rings raw and sexy, cranky or disappointed, confused or amused. Like much of her work they deal with desire, sensation, female energy, and the visceral nature of language. Poetic influences including Ezra Pound, Emily Dickinson, Robert Creeley, and Mitch Highfill may be traced here, and are complemented by appearances of pop-culture figures such as Sigourney Weaver, Ann Margaret, and the Velvet Underground. Phipps's work emanates a sincerity and directness that is all too rare in our current age of irony.
About the author: Wanda Phipps is a poet, performer, translator, and journalist. She received her B.A. in English with a Theater Concentration from Barnard College of Columbia University, studied poetry with Bernadette Mayer, Allen Ginsberg and others at the Naropa Institute. Phipps also studied theater and acting at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco. She is the author of the CD-Rom Zither Mood (Faux Press), the chapbooks Lunch Poems (Boog Literature), Your Last Illusion, or Break-Up Sonnets (Situations Press), and After the Mishap (Faux Press). Her poems have appeared in more than sixty publications, including Salon, Agni, Exquisite Corpse, How2, The World, Hanging Loose, Shampoo, and Boog Lit. She has also been featured in the anthologies: Verses That Hurt: Pleasure and Pain from the Poemfone Poets (St. Martin's Press), Oblek: Writing From The New Coast (oblek editions), The Portable Boog Reader (Boog Literature) and the Boston Poetry Marathon 2003 Postcard Set (Boog City). She is a contributing editor for Big Bridge, and served on the editorial board of Lungfull! She has performed on stages all over the U.S. as a poet and with her various bands. Her poetry has been the subject of a short film entitled Filmpoem for Wanda Phipps by Joel Schlemowitz. Wake-Up Calls: 66 Morning Poems is her first full-length collection.
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