Book description
Loose Sugar is an alchemical manuscript disguised as a collection of
poems, or vice versa. Either way, the primal materials of which this
book is comprised -- love, sex, adolescence, space-time, depression,
post-colonialism, and sugar -- are movingly and mysteriously transmuted:
not into gold, but into a poet's philosopher's stone, in which language
marries life.
Structurally virtuosic, elaborate without being ornate, Loose Sugar is
spun into series within series: each of the five sections has a dual
heading (such as "space / time" or "time / work") in
which the terms are neither in collision nor collusion, but in
conversation. It's elemental sweet talk, and is Brenda Hillman's most
experimental work to date, culminating in a meditation on the
possibility of a native -- and feminine -- language. BRENDA HILLMAN
teaches writing at St. Mary's College in Moraga, CA. Her other books,
all published by Wesleyan, include Cascadia (2001), Death Tractates
(1992), Bright Existence (1992), and Fortress (1989).
