Incarnate: Story Material

by Thalia Field

An enthralling new work by one of America's foremost experimental writers. Thalia Field's inventive new book explores the very condition of being incarnate: how, invested with human form, we experience both suffering and ecstasy from childhood to adulthood to death. As with her previous book published by New Directions, Point and Line (2000), Incarnate defies categorization: it "industriously works the sparsely populated and as yet underdeveloped...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811215997
• ISBN13: 9780811215992
• Release Date: October 2004
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Length: 126 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.4" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A Gift, A Giver, A Grateful Nation

I must have been out of the loop when New Directions issued Thalia Field's book last October. Either that, or they aren't doing a very good job letting the people know about her new release. It has been five years since Thalia Field's first book and the mob has gotten hungry since then. Like the little boy said to his grandma in the movie theater, "Look Grandma, there's one poor lion up there hasn't got a Christian!" That's how I have felt ever since Point and Line came out and momentarily quashed my hunger for more of Thalia Field's innovative fictions. It has been a long hungry haul since 2000, but intermittently, here and there, if you kept your eyes peeled to the little magazines, you might have stumbled on a piece by her. There was one in the Chicago Review, another in Fence. Influential places like that. Now finally a whole book and it's been available for awhile. Well you could have knocked me over with a feather. Luckily a friend of mine who works with Ms. Field sent me this book to celebrate an important life occasion. Otherwise I'd still be hungry. The book begins with one of her best stories so far, the life of her name, with a clever pun on "Field," as though it were some of Charles Olson's Field research, based on (what seems like) some painstaking research into different sites in the USA called "Thalia." It's a challenging tour de force and it comes to an end at the perfect place, more of an achievement than that sounds in this age where everything goes on for a beat too long. Field has what amounts to a perfect ear when it comes to laying down the ground rules for her piece (whatever it is at the moment) and then breaking them slightly when she needs to, and then letting the inner form of the story dictate its conclusion. Similarly, another important "autocartography" story, one called "Feeling Into Motion" takes up the knotty issue of the USA's relation to Alaska: signed, sealed, and delivered, who were the plotters who delivered this vast Indian land into our hands? Field shows us in little steps, what happens to a nation when its leaders secede. She is half a poet, half a seer, and huge chunks of her mind belong to history and to the commission of mercy. I have one bone to pick and that is with her publisher. I address my concluding remarks to New Directions press. New Directions, you were the people who went whole hog for Robert Duncan when he had the looney idea to print big chunks of GROUND WORK exactly as they looked coming off his Olivetti. You went the extra mile for him, and yet for Thalia Field you force her to print her important poem, STORY MATERIAL, *sideways* just because its lines are too long to accommodate your miniature size page widths. Boy, does that look cheap. New Directions, you were once the estimable press people longed to publish with, now you're making them look silly amateurs. And what is up with continuing to print, on the copyright page, the words, "New Directions Books are pub