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Poetry

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Reactor Judith Vollmer The University of Wisconsin Press Poetry Series, Ronald Wallace, Series Editor "Read Reactor and let Vollmer refresh your geography in startling ways."—Robin Becker, author of The Horse Fair Reactor gives voice to beloved and ruined American landscapes through extended meditations of an urban mystical wanderer. "Reactor places new emphasis on our complicitous age of nuclear fission at all levels of conscientiousness, in the strategies of highbrow expatriates, and Vollmer's identification with the 'lowest of the low' wayfaring strangers, a high-wire act among her pantheon of peasant witnesses. This archaeology of tonalities, sometimes evinced with compelling lines from her literary ancestors, connects the fierce remembrance of 'family,' hers and ours. We have a new vocabulary of songmaking, ancient and modern." —Michael S. Harper, poet laureate emeritus, Rhode Island Judith Vollmer is professor of English and director of the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg. Her books include The Door is Open to the Fire and Level Green, the 1990 winner of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry. For more information contact our publicity manager, phone: (608) 263-0734, email: publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu Excerpt from "Coffee with Narrative" Voltaire's 70 cups to my 2, what does that make me, though his we think were demitasse and mine are big as small dogs. How no one smokes anymore, sad, I open my pack here in the night kitchen and out comes the exotic Mlle. Teuer, laughing, black cat on her shoulder, and I rivet her cup of sugar tar while she smokes into the night and regales me with her vanished opera star years, drops of holiness wetting her smock. If I run my hand along this shelf I slide into a farm- stead where I drink the green, the black teas, organic leaves picked from bushes silvered under rain in far places no longer far. But the beloved sister to merlot & cognac, to mountain water over matching ice cubes would be the gift of Ethiopia that would transmorgrify Earth. Dear red berries who made goats dance about, dear leaf veins standing turgid and erect, how the little goats in their happiness peed on those bushes, thus deeping the primal blend from Dante to Beauvoir.

April 2004 LC: 2003021173 PS 106 pp. 6 1/2 x 10 ISBN 0-299-19940-1 Cloth $26.95 s ISBN 0-299-19944-4 Paper $14.95 t To order, you can accumulate titles in the Shopping Cart by clicking on the bulleted lines below. You can submit your order electronically, paying for it with MasterCard or Visa. Click here for further explanation of shopping cart feature. Never ordered from us before? Read this first.