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About this product
Product Identifiers
PublisherFence Magazine, Incorporated
ISBN-100974090972
ISBN-139780974090979
eBay Product ID (ePID)44770700
Product Key Features
Book TitlePovel
Number of Pages123 Pages
LanguageEnglish
Publication Year2005
TopicAmerican / Asian American, General
GenrePoetry
AuthorGeraldine Kim
FormatPerfect
Dimensions
Item Height0.4 in
Item Weight8.1 Oz
Item Length8 in
Item Width6 in
Additional Product Features
Intended AudienceTrade
Dewey Edition0
Reviews"Kim's centaur debut is a constant notebook, humming with graffiti and gossip, bad jokes, great jokes, bodily functions, lyrics, juvenile glosses, sudden sadnesses. Povel comes equipped with a hilarious, spurious Lyn Hejinian intro, the longest title in the world, and observations on how her writing-workshop cohorts are responding to the text. Kim comments on the spell-checker's comments, Rage Against the Machine, the NYU suicides, Infinite Jest. She's her own A.D.D. Boswell, a self-mythologizing Korean American diva worth a thousand Margaret Chos." -- Village Voice, "Kim's centaur debut is a constant notebook, humming with graffiti and gossip, bad jokes, great jokes, bodily functions, lyrics, juvenile glosses, sudden sadnesses. Povel comes equipped with a hilarious, spurious Lyn Hejinian intro, the longest title in the world, and observations on how her writing-workshop cohorts are responding to the text. Kim comments on the spell-checker's comments, Rage Against the Machine, the NYU suicides, Infinite Jest. She's her own A.D.D. Boswell, a self-mythologizing Korean American diva worth a thousand Margaret Chos."--Village Voice
SynopsisPovel is a fantastic, extended excursion into the mind and life (in words) of Geraldine Kim, a young, first-generation Korean-American girl born into the most modern of all situations: the end of the 20th century in a small town in New England, from which she launches herself through venues urban and cerebral, academic and commercial. The book-length poem's stream of consciousness is just that: a stream, untrained and unleashed. Its form, however, is strictly, if arbitrarily regulated by another or our most modern conveniences: the "centered" stanza, which provides not only a container for the author's thinking, saying, and doing, but also a means of signification: This is a poem-novel -- or "povel" -- by virtue of its self-reliance and its bold marking of territory. Povel is, in the author's own words: "a successful merging between confessional verse poetry and the novel" -- hence the coinage of its title. Povel is also a radical entry in the annals of the several genres. The author purports an omniscient skepticism about its future: that it will ever be read; that it can be appreciated. Its reader cannot help but be amazed and heartened at the vigor this book injects into its chosen forms, and the humor with which its despair is tempered., POVEL is a compulsive read; an extended excursion into the mind and life of Kim, a first-generation Korean-American., "Kim's centaur debut is a constant notebook, humming with graffiti and gossip, bad jokes, great jokes, bodily functions, lyrics, juvenile glosses, sudden sadnesses. . . . She's her own A.D.D. Boswell, a self-mythologizing Korean American diva worth a thousand Margaret Chos."-- The Village Voice , Top 25 Books of the Year, 2005
