In No One's Land - Softcover

Ackerson-Kiely, Paige

4.29

101 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0916272923 ISBN 13: 9780916272920

Publisher: Ahsahta Press, 2007

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Poetry. Winner of the 2006 Sawtooth Poetry Prize, Paige Ackerson-Kiely's IN NO ONE'S LAND "...stakes a claim on wilderness and, most assuredly, mannages to homestead there. These are not the poems borne of quiet contemplation; they are edgy and lurid, painfully administering to the world of convenience stores, diners, one-night stads..daring to pick at the raw skin of being and to call it beauty...From the starkness of glaciers to the empty refrigerator, these poems rise from the most barren landscapes and manage to make of them fabled islands, joyful joyful things"--D.A. Powell.

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About the Author:

Paige Ackerson-Kiely has traveled extensively throughout Europe and the Near East, and has lived in Denmark, Turkey, Palestine, Wisconsin and New Mexico before semi-settling in Lincoln, Vermont with her small family, where she lives and works today. In 2006 she received the Poets & Writers Writers Exchange Award.

Review:

These are poems of gravity and some sort of omniscience. The narrator knows the boundaries, passions, and intentions of her characters as if better than they do, and has little doubt as to how the poetry will react. What s most refreshing is that there is little abstraction and self-conscious irony in the language, but still the opportunity for the mind to fill in its share of blanks. We don t have to learn to read these poems, but we have no choice but to react to them. Most lines are declarative and, though often neurotically considerate, the voice employed can be chastising and stark. In Instructional Lecture for a Liquor Store Clerk, Ackerson-Kiely brings across the immediacy of not only the poem, but of the entire collection:

The customers want something from you that you do not own but

in fact lord over. Let the older men call you baby or hon, it relaxes

them. See how they tremble, hands like a wet fawn one hour old

pushing up to stand. It will be a hard winter and the fawn won t

make it. Mostly it is bleak.

It s this sense of awareness she holds over the poems that keeps us willing to find out and discover. What else does she know? The poems seem to understand too well their surroundings and apologize for that fact only by exploring some more. It s as if they are telling the reader, See? It s not that bad. We all do it; it happens to everyone. The odd stability on the part of the narrator, even when the circumstances should elicit trepidation or some morose eeriness, is compulsive and pure. from the review by DJ Dolack in Octopus [read the entire review here].

Ackerson-Kiely, winner of the 2006 Sawtooth Poetry Prize, delivers to the reader an attitude translated by smaller journeys and moments, implying a past worth more than the telling, a past worth living both through and beyond. Sometimes this is demonstrated in a line as simple as it is true I am afraid of the stranger in men, from her poem To the Understudy'; at other times the sentiment is more complex, riddled into the precious by her use of imagery to create a second world within the poem, as in Foucault s Bed : The bed is where you work, castigated, is not like / two mares staring down the girder of their noses. . . . Crawl or jump in, death just makes the other saddest. Woe. Like / what you would say to horses if you ever wanted them to stop. from J. Noel Trapp s review in ForeWord [read the entire review here].

The unscratchable itch lives, like many of the objects of desire Ackerson-Kiely summons, somewhere between the imagination and the viscera. To say that her poetic subject is inwardness would be understatement; to call it confessional would miss the point. It follows a trajectory from the personal to the private, the private to the hidden, the hidden to the unsayable.

In No One s Land is a personal archaeology of loss, one inscribed in the flesh like faded bruises and improperly set bones. Ackerson-Kiely s high lonesome verses pose unformable questions and answer them in the only way possible: crab-wise and tentatively. from Matt Frassica s review in Seven Days [read the entire review here].

[Ackerson-Kiely], in other words, is making not a dramatic script for performance but in a way a specification, a scenario, a kind of forestory whose force comes from the inflection it gives to the imagination after it finishes with the work itself. This is the kind of poem that is difficult to end, one wishes with this kind of poem sometimes that there was some kind of musical track that could slowly swell and drown out the speaking voice, but I think Paige s solution to give a kind of sentience to the rust itself, to complete the population of this world, is pure skill.

In the end the clich� of the New York Times Book Review that this or that inanimate object ( New York! Ambition! The Fashion Line of Gianni Versace! ) has become a character itself is indeed brought overabundantly to the reader in Paige s text. D.A. Powells blurb on the back describes Paige s work as joyful (actually, since this is a blurb, he describes it as joyful joyful ) I think better a way to describe this poem is as triumphant, with the sensation of a poetic mistress leaning down over a world and inbreathing a strange kind of life.

P.S.: if you are wondering who Roscoe Holcomb is, we have wikipedia: Roscoe Holcomb (1911-1981) was an American singer, banjo player, and guitarist from Daisy, Kentucky. A prominent figure in Appalachian folk music, Holcomb was the inspiration for John Cohen’s coining of the term ‘high, lonesome sound. from Simon DeDeo s review of A Day as Roscoe Holcomb, from In No One’s Land [read the entire review here].

The poems of this collection show remarkable range they are at once clean and headlong; driven by music ( Deer at the roadside, deer in the meadow, / tall grass, headlight. Broken, bro. ken . . . ) and driven by imaginative narrative gesture ( It is late and the waitress is shining cutlery, folding cloth squares into neat little tents a boy who is small for his age might imag�ine sleeping under ). We are surprised as we continue reading. As we should be. In this book, we find straightforward syntax and syntax slightly skewed and the poems are, whether spare or thick on the page, clear, accessible, realized. Paige Ackerson-Kiely has written a wonderfully cohesive and exciting collection exciting for its reach and mature and masterful handling of material and exciting, too, for its promise of what will come. Martha Rhodes

In No One s Land stakes a claim on wilderness and, most assuredly, manages to homestead there. These are not the poems born of quiet contemplation; they are edgy and lurid, painfully administering to the world of convenience stores, diners, one-night stands. I locked up all of the beautiful things that might move me, says Paige Ackerson-Kiely, daring to pick at the raw skin of being and to call it beauty: I am saying God, if you are anywhere, let you be an arctic night. From the starkness of glaciers to the empty refrigerator, these poems rise from the most barren landscapes and manage to make of them fabled islands, joyful joyful things. D.A. Powell, judge, 2006 Sawtooth Poetry Prize

It is a rare and welcome thing to encounter a collection which possesses such authority, such an unassuming combination of inevitability and strangeness. It is rarer still to find these qualities in a first book. Paige Ackerson-Kiely s haunted and compelling poems are terse but expansive, and fierce in their disdain of posturing or trivia. In No One's Land introduces us to a poet of genuine originality and immense talent. David Wojahn

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