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Veliz Books P.O. Box 961273 El Paso, TX 79996 info@velizbooks.com

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(aviary) BY GENEVIEVE KAPLAN

Release Date: March, 2020 ISBN 978-1-949776-06-5 Poetry | $17 Number of pages: 90

PRAISE FOR (aviary)

In (aviary) Genevieve Kaplan both relishes and challenges her limitations within these dynamic garden spaces and grants herself permission to re-design their elements of birds, leaves, beak taps, sugar, and shade. Borrowing scraps and hearsay from Mina Loy’s “Ladies in an Aviary,” Kaplan ponders her own complicit inclinations. The poems’ syntactical phrases veer, skip, and hover, defying time and vantage points: “the only fine thing, the only petaled thing, the gray / path slowly curving to the right, to the left, curving away the only only / soft thing.” At once furtive and bold, Kaplan considers the very “nature” of herself and these spaces and “how / to get outside enough to see myself looking in.” An intricate and gorgeous book by one of our most inventive poets.

—Molly Bendall, author of Watchful

The poems in (aviary) circle themes of enclosure, feminism, and the natural world. Much of the collection was initially composed in local public gardens, lending these poems an air of urgency, the stink of voyeurism, and the hum of participation. This collection owes much, too, to Mina Loy’s prose poem “Ladies in an Aviary,” which lends language and thematic play to Kaplan's (aviary).

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An aviary is a cage one enters to be close to birds. And in this (aviary), Genevieve Kaplan focuses on imprisonment with two curved fences of parentheses around the title in her magisterial book built from layers of fragmentation, collage, reprise, and the arid south of inland California. Mina Loy’s poem, “Ladies in an Aviary,” is inspiration and prism through which Kaplan approaches large questions: how to see and risk being seen, how to be the creek winding down the hill, drying up, secreting oneself under dirt, how to delve into power dynamics between men and women, humans and the natural world, how to interrogate language itself. —Marsha de la O, author of Every Ravening Thing Genevieve Kaplan’s poems in (aviary) expertly interlace human and nonhuman experience as only the best poets can so to find the solutions for life on this challenging planet, “body is a short-haired animal and uncomfortable in being so observed.” This poetry flies to the top with brilliance!

—CA Conrad, author of While Standing in Line for Death

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Genevieve Kaplan is the author of (aviary) (Veliz Books, 2020), In the ice house (Red Hen Press, 2011), winner of the A Room of Her Own Foundation's poetry publication prize, and three chapbooks: In an aviary (Grey Book Press, 2016), travelogue (Dancing Girl, 2016), and settings for these scenes (Convulsive Editions, 2013). Genevieve earned her MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and her PhD in Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. She lives in southern California and edits the Toad Press International chapbook series, publishing contemporary translations of poetry and prose.

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