Poetry
Funny
Jennifer Michael Hecht
Winner of the 2005 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, selected by Billy Collins
A tour de force, Funny is a masterpiece of poetic, as well as philosophic and comic, invention. It creates a musing world where the issues are philosophical but the focus is always on people, on our most private ways of balancing our accounts. The poems are psychological; tender and humane, and somehow ruthless. This is poetry that swarms with ideas, that revels in rhythmic intricacy and literary references, but is also clear as a bell and tells marvelous stories.
Jennifer Michael Hecht is a historian who has published several scholarly volumes and one previous collection of poetry. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
For more information contact our publicity manager, phone: (608) 263-0734, email: publicity@uwpress.wisc.eduPublishers Weekly gave a starred review to Hecht's Funny
Funny
Hecht, Jennifer Michael
ISBN: 0299214044
University of Wisconsin Press
Published 2005-11
Paperback, $14.95 (88p)
Poetry | American | General
"Hecht's sophomore effort is one of the most entertaining, and most original, books of the year. Its conceit, barring a few introductory sonnets, is to riff on jokes-become-aphorisms, dismantling assumptions as quickly as she dishes punch lines. "What did the sadist do to the masochist?/ Nothing" generates a brisk, hyperintelligent lyric about the ideas of need and mastery, studded by frequent half-rhymes and internal rhymes. "How many gorillas does it take/ to screw in a lightbulb?" prompts three pages of subtle, wise meditation on human evolution and human error. "Are You Not Glad?" turns a knock-knock joke into smart couplets about regret and love: "Orange you glad? No, I'm not. I ate the berries./ I was hungry. I was young." Switching deftly between the caricatured protagonists of the jokes themselves and more nuanced memories from real lives, Hecht sees how many jokes depend on familiarity and surprise, and how many highlight the disappointments ordinary experience can provide: "One way or another we all become/ the other." The New York-based Hecht (The Next Ancient World ), who also writes books of popular philosophy (Doubt: A History ), appends a neat 11-page prose essay about the relations between jokes and poems: even without the essay, this book brings the two forms tantalizingly close." —Reviewed 2005-10-24, Publishers Weekly
November 2005
LC: 2005011174 PS
100 pp. 6 x 9
3 computer graphics images
ISBN 0-299-21400-1 Cloth $26.95 s
ISBN 0-299-21404-4 Paper $14.95 t
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