A Fine Excess: Contemporary Literature at Play

by Kirby Gann

A collection of poetry, fiction, and essay where language isn't strictly functional but comes at the world in its most intense states--in reverie, in revelry, in fine excess; writers who must have, as Paul West once termed it, the world written up . These are minds unavoidably alive on the page. And there they move freely, in particular musical fashion, often making unlikely connections, sometimes jutting their sentences into odd and disproportionate...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1889330515
• ISBN13: 9781889330518
• Release Date: January 2001
• Publisher: Sarabande Books
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

An excessively wonderful anthology

When I saw the list of contributors in A Fine Excess, I knew immediately that this was something I needed to look into. I found it even better than I had expected. I wasn't confronted with the standard list of politically-correct writers, with their oatmeal-flavored politically-correct poetry, that's been the fare of most contemporary anthologies I've seen. On the contrary, this book shows tremendous editorial integrity and risk to put known-but-not-necessarily-liked authors like e. e. cummings alongside relative unknowns like Jeff McDaniel, without many sure-fire sellers. The few expected names that do pop up are in here on their own aesthetic merit, not because they were/are powerful, or because their work plugs into any particular ideology; the only agenda is to pull together a picture of really inventive, linguistically and intellectually daring work. As a whole, this text really works, too, building an aesthetic that's not only lucid and definite, but actually delightful.Not only is A Fine Excess a treasure to page through on a chilly afternoon, but I would also wholeheartedly recommend it as a text for a creative writing class--with the one caveat that it should be used in conjunction with discussion of authors like Shakespeare, Donne, Eliot, and so forth. The writers selected for A Fine Excess have a firm grounding in this kind of literary bedrock; the glorious thing is that they show us just how far, and how gracefully, a talented writer can leap into the artistic aether.