Research Catalog

Title

The milk of inquiry : poems / Wayne Koestenbaum.

Author

Koestenbaum, Wayne

Publication

New York : Persea Books, c1999.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

134 p.; 21 cm.

Summary

• In The Milk of Inquiry, poet and critic Wayne Koestenbaum has written his most beautiful book - more mediative and more provocative than his previous, much-praised work. The volume's most ambitious gesture is a long poem, "Metamorphoses (Masked Ball)," a sequence of 115 bawdy, speedy sonnets, spoken by mythological figures ghosting as historical personages - among them, Orpheus speaking as Elvis, Proserpina speaking as Freud, Adonis speaking as Cleopatra, and Daphne speaking as Wilde. The swirling disobedient voices form a closet drama, a splintered monologue, a shadow theater of violation and transfiguration.
• The book begins with short lyrics that show Koestenbaum's opulent sensibility at its most austere. Meanwhile, in a long autobiographical poem, "Four Lemon Drops," he jostles the reader with pleasurable, roller-coaster swerves, and hurtles - in quatrains - between the poles of irony and lament.

Subject

Gay men > Poetry

Genre/Form

Poetry

Note

• "A Karen and Michael Braziller book."

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Forgotten Songs -- Who Polished the Wood? -- Splinters -- Poem -- Into the Lobster Bisque of the Sky I Shall Sail -- Holes -- The Complete History of My Crotch -- The Complete History of My Brain -- Lament -- The Beautiful -- Pilot of the Falling Helicopter -- Christopher Meets the Sublime -- Poem for My Son -- Obligation Days -- Men I Led Astray -- History of Boys -- Gaudy Slave Trader -- In Pursuit of Lost Rigor -- I Tried an Ox -- Poem for My Son (II) -- My Child -- The Complete History of My Brain (II) -- Infection -- Hygiene Kit -- Poem for George Platt Lynes -- The Photographer -- Three Disappearances -- Lithium -- Four Lemon Drops -- Metamorphoses (Masked Ball).

ISBN

0892552395

LCCN

^^^98050497^

OCLC

• 40489120
• SCSB-10871275

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library