"In Barbara Tomash’s brilliant reworking of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, the continuity and causality of the nineteenth-century novel are transformed into the isolate flecks of twenty-first century poetry. In this masterpiece of excision and refashioning, Tomash has uncovered the troubling, luminous strands within the text, and given us a revelatory and radical new experience of her protagonist, Isabel. If the novelist built a world that is stable, the poet unveils a world that is fluid or broken or shifting and shimmering, in which the language has its own story to tell. When that language is set free in the poem, placed in dialogue with silence, what do we find in Her Scant State? America, men, marriage, money: the familiar detritus of our capitalism. And also a breathtaking lyricism, alive inside every word of this powerful poem." -- provided by distributor
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.