4:30 Movie: Poems

Donna Masini

$15.95

Publication Date: January 21st, 2020

Publisher:

W. W. Norton & Company

ISBN:

9780393357004

Pages:

Description

“Urgent, varied poems… playful, surprising and sad by turns, or meditative.” —Washington Post

“The overarching metaphors of film and movie-going appear gracefully” (Lauren Kane, Paris Review) in the poems of 4:30 Movie—by turns intimate and wild, provocative and tender. Award-winning poet Donna Masini explores personal loss, global violence, the preoccupations of our daily lives, and the consolations of art as she brings her wit, grief, fury, and propulsive energy to bear on our attempts to bargain with endings of every kind.

About the Author

Donna Masini is the author of three collections of poetry and a novel. She was awarded the Barnard Women Poets Prize, a Pushcart Prize, a fellowship with the New York Foundation for the Arts, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. She teaches at Hunter College and lives in New York City.

Praise for 4:30 Movie: Poems

A stunning, playful, searing, healing collection that will enlarge the reader and revive something crucial in American poetry.
— Tracy K. Smith

Agile, generous, and often dazzling.… The poems in 4:30 Movie will be remembered long after the book is closed.

— Tony Leuzzi - Brooklyn Rail

This is courageous writing, not for what Masini withstood but for how she says it with exquisite dependable skill.
— Grace Cavalieri - Midwest Book Review

Donna Masini is, among other things, an incisive chronicler of grief.
— Nick Ripatrazone - Poetry Foundation

Masini has a gift for developing the deep trope. And a great love for her sister. Combine the two, and the result is a brilliantly moving book.
— Laverne Frith - New York Journal of Books

The collection speaks earnestly about feeling let down and abandoned, yet feverishly seeks solace in art, finding that ‘Here the weariest / come to rest / in the swirl / of light and time and water.’
— Joe Hoover - America: The Jesuit Review

There is so much to admire in Masini’s poetry, including a sly humor and a gorgeous lyricism.… [4:30 Movie is] an important and thoughtful book.

— Charles Rammelkamp - Lake Poetry

[These poems] are extraordinary—electric with anxiety, smart, witty, constantly turning on themselves.… I love this book.
— Marie Howe, author of Magdalene

The speaker in this driven, headlong collection confronts the terrifying progress of her sister’s illness and watches her own mind perform the thousand jittery dances it does to ward off the unthinkable. Reimagining her poems from the ground up, Masini emerges with a voice pressurized and anxious, a music tuned by an ear listening every second for the next alarm. 4:30 Movie is wrenching, full of smarts and nerve, and Donna Masini’s best book yet.

— Mark Doty, author of Deep Lane

The poems in this new volume are not only Masini’s most formally adventurous and inventive, they are also her most compelling.… There is a new gravitas in these poems, which, when combined with her formal intelligence, makes the poetry quite dazzling.… 4:30 Movie has the hallmarks of a capstone work.

— Lynn Emanuel, author of The Nerve of It