The Escape
Jo Ann Wasserman
“In these brilliant sestinas of assemblage and their tenuous enkomion asides, the reader is taken/taking place, as if in detailed alignment with the poet-family footage scattered over the floor and glued back warily as Wasserman constructs her map of escape from that loving tyranny. An extraordinary first book in which every utterance is compelled by the imagination’s fleeing from the known.”
—Kathleen Fraser
“The Escape is a kinetic maelstrom in which Wasserman’s attention is always laconic and precise...a calmly breathless, run-on sentence that gathers information at every instant, while careening downhill...prose where diary and fiction slip around each other...a music that is intoxicating and unmistakable in its honoring of the turbulence of being alive in the not so distant present, past and future.”
—John Yau
“There is much at stake in this book: ‘motherhood, fortune, providence, the stars and then depression...the false Italy’ or false anything vs. a real me or you. This book is ‘round, soft, sad, expensive, pink’...it is also dark, sharp-limbed, heart-wrenching, hilarious and smart. Kafka once declared ‘A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.’ In form and in content, this is one of the bravest books of poetry I’ve read.”
—Eleni Sikelianos
About the Author
Jo Ann Wasserman is the author of two chapbooks of poetry “What Counts As Proof” (Sugarbooks) and “We Build Mountains” (a+bend press). Her work has appeared in The World, Grand Street, can we have our ball back? and The East Village. She is the former Managing Editor of How2, an online journal of innovative writing by women, and former Program Coordinator at The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. She recently earned an M.F.A. in poetics from the New College of California and currently lives in New York City where she works for Granary Books.
“In these brilliant sestinas of assemblage and their tenuous enkomion asides, the reader is taken/taking place, as if in detailed alignment with the poet-family footage scattered over the floor and glued back warily as Wasserman constructs her map of escape from that loving tyranny. An extraordinary first book in which every utterance is compelled by the imagination’s fleeing from the known.”
—Kathleen Fraser
“The Escape is a kinetic maelstrom in which Wasserman’s attention is always laconic and precise...a calmly breathless, run-on sentence that gathers information at every instant, while careening downhill...prose where diary and fiction slip around each other...a music that is intoxicating and unmistakable in its honoring of the turbulence of being alive in the not so distant present, past and future.”
—John Yau
“There is much at stake in this book: ‘motherhood, fortune, providence, the stars and then depression...the false Italy’ or false anything vs. a real me or you. This book is ‘round, soft, sad, expensive, pink’...it is also dark, sharp-limbed, heart-wrenching, hilarious and smart. Kafka once declared ‘A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.’ In form and in content, this is one of the bravest books of poetry I’ve read.”
—Eleni Sikelianos
About the Author
Jo Ann Wasserman is the author of two chapbooks of poetry “What Counts As Proof” (Sugarbooks) and “We Build Mountains” (a+bend press). Her work has appeared in The World, Grand Street, can we have our ball back? and The East Village. She is the former Managing Editor of How2, an online journal of innovative writing by women, and former Program Coordinator at The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. She recently earned an M.F.A. in poetics from the New College of California and currently lives in New York City where she works for Granary Books.