Details

Subject(s)

• American poetry [Browse]

Library of Congress genre(s)

• Poetry [Browse]

Getty AAT genre

• poetry [Browse]

Series

National poetry series [More in this series]

Summary note

A collection of language-driven, imaginative poetry from the winner of the 2015 National Poetry Series Open Competition.Jennifer Kronovets poetry is inflected by her fraught, ecstatic relationship with languagesentences, words, phonemes, punctuationand how meaning is both gained and lost in the process of communicating. Having lived all over the world, both using her native tongue and finding it impossible to use, Kronovet approaches poems as tactile, foreign objects, as well as intimate, close utterances.In The Wug Test, named for a method by which a linguist discovered how deeply imprinted the cognitive instinct toward acquiring language is in children, Kronovet questions whether words are objects we should escape from or embrace. Dispatches of text from that researcher, Walt Whitman, Ferdinand de Saussure, and the poet herself, among other voices, are mined for their futility as well as their beauty, in poems that are technically revealing and purely pleasurable. Throughout, a boy learns how to name and ask for those things that makes up his world.

Bibliographic references

Includes bibliographical references (page 81-82).

Awards

Winner of the 2015 National poetry series competition.

Contents

• One ( Critical period hypothesis ; With the boy, with myself ; Language acquisition device (LAD) ; With the boy, system ; John langshaw Austin (1911-1960) ; With the boy, in the house ; Father tongue ; With the boy, inside the museum ; Jean Berko Gleason ; With the boy, outside ; Loan words ; Idiolect ; With the boy, with the book ; The future of wnriting in English ; With the boy, we made ourselves through ; Second language interference ; English female speech ; With the boy, in the box ; Idioms ; With the boy, with my father ; On translation: Celia Dropkin's "My hands" (Yiddish) ; With the boy who wants to see his heart ; Mother tongue ; With the boy, on a walk ; Neologism)
• Two ( Transcript conventions)
• Three ( Letter ; With the boy, I'm plain ; Ten ways to mourn a dead language ; Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941) ; With the boy who gazes ; Semantic analysis: ways ; Isolates ; Before the boy, I ; Corpus analysis of Jennifer Kronovet's poetry collection Awayward ; With the boy, by the window ; Hypothesis-girl ; Semantic analysis: beauty ; With the boy, now ; Phonetics: S, a love story ; Before the boy, once ; Framing in discourse ; Q&A ; With the boy, in the garden ; Repetition ; Aphasia ; With the boy, with flowers ; Trip to Saussureland ; With the boy, cut through ; Metaphors we live by: in ; With the boy, in the dark ; The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis)

ISBN

• 9780062564580 ((paperback))
• 0062564587 ((paperback))

LCCN

2017299368

OCLC

943698151

Statement on language in description

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