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Outer Pradesh
winner of the 2015 Yale Bollingen Prize for Poetry Poetry Paperbook: $12 ISBN: 978-1-939781-23-9 |
From Outer Pradesh
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PRESS
"Possession indeed is a major issue in this new work, Outer Pradesh (Anomalous Press, 2014; limited edition of 100 copies).Here Mackey applies the concept of “held-not-had” to relationships of love, and the concept of “I-Insofar” conveys the feeling both of the borderlessness of the body-moving-“outward” and of the tenuousness of identity."
from Notes toward understanding Outer Pradesh by Al Filreis in Jacket2
"Of Outer Pradesh the judges said: “The book’s epigraph is Jean Toomer’s assertion of modernist open-endedness and generic not-belonging: ‘There is no end to ‘out.’’ Mackey applies this endlessly outward-going passage to an ecstatic, exilic experience, as a group of travelers — a ‘philosophical posse’ — makes its way across an Indian province. What they and we encounter on this journey is a pre-history embodied by ‘old-time people’ whose songs must be heard. Together we find ourselves within an improvised social continuum that grows larger, stranger, more remote, and more consoling at every turn. Memory becomes a site of social commentary and collective vision. Mackey’s epic of fugitivity forms a stunning meditation on being.”"
from Yale University's press release Nathaniel Mackey Wins Yale's 2015 Bollingen Prize for Poetry
Nathaniel Mackey is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Nod House (New Directions, 2011), an ongoing prose work, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, of which four volumes have been published, most recently Bass Cathedral (New Directions, 2008), and two books of criticism, most recently Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews (Wisconsin, 2005). He edits the journal Hambone and coedited, with Art Lange, the anthology Moment's Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose (Coffee House, 1993). He lives in Durham, North Carolina, and teaches at Duke University.
