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"Jennifer Michael Hecht writes delightfully tricky poems that wildly bend the sense of our language as they swerve back and forth between the realms of the colloquial and the absurd. The result of these maneuvers is The Next Ancient World - a deconstructed soap-opera, a one-hundred-ring verbal circus, a gang of brazen, ingenious poems."
— Billy Collins, former U.S. Poet Laureate
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Poetry from this volume also appeared in the Best American Poetry 1999, guest edited by Robert Bly (Scribner).
The Next Ancient World also received a 2001 Pushcart Prize nomination.
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“Jennifer Michael Hecht's vivacious first book, The Next Ancient World, is the work of a sophisticated time-traveler who enjoys mediating between the distant past and the unknowable future. … Her poems excite thinking-they are vehicles of a restlessly curious intellect-and they never forget the poet's categorical imperative: to delight and amuse as well as to instruct the reader.”
— David Lehman, Author of The Evening Sun, Poetry Society of America Award Judge
From the back cover:
“Sharp and ripe, smart-alecky and wise, Hecht's poems...reveal a world far more witty than we thought, as dangerous, as lonely, and as tender.”
— Janet Holmes, author of The Green Tuxedo, Tupelo contest judge
“Completely astonishing. Fast, fiery, cut-to-the-quick, street-smart and woman-wise, as sophisticated as you can be.”
— Lawrence Joseph, author of Before Our Eyes
“Hecht's poetry is as exacting as an archeologist's tools-she strips away layers of the past, finds other ones embedded there, then keeps digging. Whatever her subject is she unearths timeless truths.”
— Hal Sirowitz, author of Mother Said
Reviews:
“Everywhere witty, conversational, and smart and once in a while, a little outrageous… Age-old struggles are put into new perspective in this advice book….for our successors, Tupelo Press may want to consider that acid-free paper is not enough, and put out an edition in tablet stone.”
— Amy Holman, The Cortland Review
“A brilliant, darkly humorous debut collection.”
— Jendi Reiter, The Saint Ann's Review
“Remarkably, Hecht delivers on her promises…She believes that we can still enjoy the sensory thrills of a poem, an ephemeral moment of rapture we hope to experience as readers. The poems in The Next Ancient World live up to this ideal...”
— David Roderick, Slope
From The Next Ancient World:
History
Even Eve, the only soul in all of time
to never have to wait for love,
must have leaned some sleepless nights
alone against the garden wall
and wailed, cold, stupefied, and wild
and wished to trade-in all of Eden
to have but been a child.
In fact, I gather that is why she leapt and fell from grace,
that she might have a story of herself to tell
in some other place.
Jennifer Michael Hecht's debut poetry collection The Next Ancient World is available at
...and at many other bookstores nationwide.
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