View from a Temporary Window

Joanie Mackowski's hypnotizing View from a Temporary Window is filled with Kafka-like transformations and metamorphoses and haunted by a sense of the body's strangeness. She writes in a relaxed and lucid manner that pays scrupulous attention to both the imaginary and the real, and to what is uncanny in each.

John L. Koethe

“Joanie Mackowski's hypnotizing View from a Temporary Window is filled with Kafka-like transformations and metamorphoses and haunted by a sense of the body's strangeness. She writes in a relaxed and lucid manner that pays scrupulous attention to both the imaginary and the real, and to what is uncanny in each.”—John L. Koethe

More Praise

Joanie Mackowski's seriously iridescent, recombinant erotics are both delicate and daring. Her great subject-the permeability of self and world-yields oddly composite embodiments; perception and scale are freshly imagined, figured with elegance and an inventiveness that thrills. These are inexhaustible poems, shimmering with amplitude.

Alice Fulton

Joanie Mackowski's new collection of poetry demonstrates once again her superb combination of formal acuity, imagistic invention, and stylistic bravado. What an exceptional poetic verve there is in these exquisite and delightfully reckless poems! No one writes more passionately from a poetics of altered perspectives-here, the unreal is actual, and the actual is transcendent. Like origami unfolded upon your table, these poems reveal the blueprints of the universe.

David St. John

To say that Mackowski's poems are imaginative misses the point; they belong to their own world, a world at once grotesque and wonderful.

Foreword Magazine

Joanie Mackowski has a striking eye and she wants us to see almost as much as she wants us to feel. What matters is the wonderment beyond the 'temporary window,' a window not blocked or smudged by baggage. There's a current of urgency; the window is temporary because our lives are. These poems do seize the moment.

Valparaiso Poetry Review

The poems are not only formally stunning, but deeply felt. Mackowski forges a sinewy bond between the seedpod in the skull and that 'flawed / internal combustion' in the chest.

The Kenyon Review

Table of Contents

Sample

64 Pages, 6 x 9 in.

January, 2010

isbn : 9780822960553

Series

Pitt Poetry Series

Subjects

about the author

Joanie Mackowski is assistant professor of English at Cornell University and author of the poetry collection The Zoo. Her awards include the Emily Dickinson Prize from the Poetry Society of America, the Associated Writing Programs Award in Poetry, the Kate Tufts Discovery Prize, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Grant, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship. Mackowski’s poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 2007 and 2009, the Yale Review, Poetry, the American Scholar, New England Review, Raritan, Southwest Review, the Kenyon Review, and other journals.

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