2016
First Published
4.25
Average Rating
104
Number of Pages
Part of Series
A remarkable sequence of sonnets that reflect contemporary daily life in New York CityScaffolding is a sequence of eighty-two sonnets written over the course of a year, dated and arranged in roughly chronological order, and vividly reflecting life in New York City. In this, her third book of poetry, El�na Rivera uses the English sonnet as a scaffold to explore daily events, observations, conversations, thoughts, words, and memories—and to reflect on the work of earlier poets and the relationship between life and literature.Guided by formal and syllabic constraints, the poems become in part an exploration of how form affects content and how other poets have approached the sonnet. The poems, which are very attentive to rhythm and sound, are often in conversation with historical, philosophical, artistic, and literary sources. But at the same time they engage directly with the present moment. Like the construction scaffolding that year after year goes up around buildings all over New York, these poems build on one another and change the way we see what was there before.
Avg Rating
4.25
Number of Ratings
4
5 STARS
50%
4 STARS
25%
3 STARS
25%
2 STARS
0%
1 STARS
0%
goodreads
Author
Elena Rivera
Author · 2 books
Eléna Rivera was born in Mexico City and spent her childhood in Paris. She is the author of Mistakes, Accidents and the Want of Liberty (Barque Press, 2006), Suggestions at Every Turn (Seeing Eye Books, 2005), Unknowne Land (Kelsey St. Press, 2000), Wale; or, the Corse (Leave Books, 1995), and a recent pamphlet entitled Disturbances in the Ocean of Air (Phylum Press, 2005). She received a MacDowell Residency fellowship March-April 2005, won first prize in the 1998 Stand Magazine International Poetry Competition, the 1999 Frances Jaffer Book Award, and a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Writing 1995. She was awarded the 2007 Witter Bynner Poetry Translator Residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute in New Mexico.
