Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Travelling in Notions : The Stories of Gordon Penn, Paperback / softback Book

Travelling in Notions : The Stories of Gordon Penn Paperback / softback

Part of the James Dickey Contemporary Poetry series

Paperback / softback

Description

In Traveling in Notions Michael J. Rosen creates a novel in poems, a questing contemplation, an alter ego Gordon Penn who holds to hopefulness amid circumstances that will have none of it.

Penn is a widower, a soon-to-retire notions salesman, a Midwestern family man whom Rosen describes as akin to characters found in John Cheever's or John Updike's tales or to Italo Calvino's Marcovaldo.

Each poem in the collection relates another episode in Penn's ongoing confrontation with contemporary society.

Penn's "notions" are attempts at discovering some homeostasis, some sense of home, or, at least, some hope amid the static of a time-management consultant's radio broadcast, the months' accumulation of charitable letters, and the captivities of zoos, bodies, aging, and loneliness.

His unorthodox contemplations extend beyond meditation toward mediation, toward some means by which a person might settle oneself in the unsettled circumstances that he or she can neither welcome nor wage against alone.

Information

Information

Also in the James Dickey Contemporary Poetry series  |  View all