So Quick Bright Things

so quick bright things

by Gail Wronsky
Translation, Alicia Partnoy

ISBN 9780984578207

In Spanish translations that have the verve and intelligence of the original, Alicia Partnoy deftly conveys Gail Wronsky's brilliant riff on masks and mutability, on doubles and the doubling of desire. To "liberate dragonflies from their linguistic shrines," So Quick Bright Things meditates and mediates upon being and identity, how we couple, how we evaporate, how we peer "through the cracks in (the)...mask for/ a glimpse of something...infinite." Taking its title from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Wronsky's Oberon and Titania are hip with self-awareness and wry with lyric sadness that "what they were not...was magical." Wronsky's "fairyland" which mingles Bachelard, Peter Quince, Proust, naturally and without a stretch of artificial over-reaching, is also all too real; there's "Nothing in the world but rain and rags and/ their two beings rotating, and to touch that reality is to "Rub it. / Rub it till it tears you apart." Like the best metaphysical poets, Wronsky's work sprite-like inhabits a realm where "Sometimes airy nothing escapes/unscathed, floats under the radar/...doubling all of us into eternity," and the body, Puck-like, is never forgotten.
—Rebecca Seiferle

All writing is also an act of deep reading. Gail Wronsky's new collection, So Quick Bright Things, intimately recalibrates A Midsummer Night's Dream in order to reveal the force of the marvelous within our ordinary, daily lives, as well as the darkness that surrounds and penetrates each of our dreams. Disjunctive yet cohesive, mythic yet immediate, surreal yet inevitable, this sequence dismantles the clichés of male/female relations along with the presumptions of contemporary poetic discourse. Titania, Queen of Fairyland, is the presiding yet often troubled presence in this volume, which can be read as a brilliant, sobering, and staggeringly inventive book-length ars poetica. Once again, Gail Wronsky proves she has no equal in reckoning our age's cultural and sexual debris.
—David St. John

Shakespeare, perhaps the greatest spiritual hermaphrodite in human history, would love this book. Gail Wronsky is an essential American poet.
—Richard Katrovas