Controvertibles

Quan Barry

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780822980155
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Controvertibles features more of the refined brilliance and delicate lyricism of this poet, cast in a more meditative mode. Throughout, she examines cultural objects by lifting them out of their usual settings and repositioning them in front of new, disparate backdrops. Doug Flutie's famous Hail Mary pass and Rutger Hauer's role in Blade Runner are contextualized within the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Bob Beamon's world-record-setting long jump in the 1968 Olympics is slowed down and examined in the style of The Matrix 's revolutionary bullet time.Samantha Smith, Richard Nixon, the Shroud of Turin, Igor Stravinsky, the largo from Handel's Xerxes, the resurrection of Lazarus, and the groundbreaking 1984 Apple Computer Super Bowl commercial are among the many disparate people and objects Barry uses to explore the multifaceted nature of existence.

Table of contents

• Contents
• the 1984 Apple Super Bowl commercial as intervention
• Porte des Morts as Neutrino
• the cabriolet as metempsychosis
• the seahorse as transubstantiation
• Pernkopf ’s Atlas as Interregnum
• habeas corpus as confession
• house fire as bildungsroman
• the oboe in Handel’s largo from Xerxes as elegy
• the short brutish life of Samantha Smith as control
• aboriginal cave painting as difficulty
• purdah as polemic
• the Great Molasses Flood of 1919 as allegory
• the landmine as opiate
• Ridley Scott’s Gladiator as Partitive Genitive
• the long jump as teleportation
• mal amour as disciple
• Dosso Dossi’s Saint George as Controvertible
• crossing the South China Sea as analgesia
• figurative poem as psychostasia
• the last elephant in Burundi as vessel
• Nick Drake’s “Pink Moon” as Infatuation
• Hanging Rock as Intervention
• domestic violence as Noh play
• Pharaoh’s Daughter’s Motivation as New Criticism
• the excavated foundations of the Salem Village parsonage as resipiscence
• Rembrandt’s The Storm on the Sea of Galilee as Semiotics
• Arctic Summer as Analogy
• Rage Against the Machine as Plate Tectonics
• Vietnamese Dictionary Definition as Self-Portrait
• the final scene in Akira Kurosawa’s Ran as condition
• Lazarus as Ambiguity
• the Blue Grotto as gestation
• Stravinsky’s [line diagram] as Approximation
• “Jisas Yu Holem Hand Blong Mi” as Dream of Reunification
• the knight’s soliloquy as vespers
• the Shroud of Turin as admonition
• Emmett Till’s Open Casket as La Pietà
• self-immolation as self-immolation
• snow angels as Michael Furey
• untitled as apologia
• Richard Nixon’s 1972 Christmas Bombing Campaign as Gospel
• ultrasound as palinode
• the finite as infinite
• imitative fallacy as jeremiad
• the long jump as bullet-time
• Doug Flutie’s 1984 Orange Bowl Hail Mary as Water into Fire
• winter tragedy as fire into air
• Rutger Hauer’s Final Lines in Blade Runner as Air into Space
• banh chung as aesthetic
• Notes
• Acknowledgments