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Dog Language

Dog Language

by Chase Twichell

Published by: Copper Canyon Press

Imprint: Copper Canyon Press

96 Pages, 5.90 x 9.00 x 0.30 in

Paperback
9781556592317
Published: September 2005

$16.00

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Over the past 25 years, Twichell’s reputation and reach has broadened with each new book. She is a poet whose books are anticipated and consistently receive stellar national review attention:

“A major voice in contemporary poetry.”—Publishers Weekly

“A poet with a dazzling and profound imagination.”—Library Journal

“An extraordinary poet whose lyrics plumb great intellectual and emotional depths.”—The Miami Herald

“There is a . . . Zen-like lucidity to [Twichell’s] poetry.”—The Washington Post

Dog Language addresses the Zen question “What is the self?” in the modern age, where individual identity is questioned, medicated, and revised. Chase Twichell’s tightly drawn poems move through the stages of human development and capture the complex emotions and challenges of family and aging.

Like the best of artists, Twichell is able to handle common themes and emotions without ever reducing them to cliché or sentiment. She reminds us of “The Rules” she uses in her poems: “Tell the truth. No decoration. Remember death.” In one of the most poignant sections of Dog Language, she writes of her father’s death and asks what, if anything, survives us:

From Dog Biscuits

After my father’s cremation,
my sisters and I agreed
to bury him privately
when the ground thawed.
One will plant a flowering tree,
one see to the stone and its cutting,
one call the grave-digger and the town clerk.
It’ll be just us, the daughters,
presiding over ashes that could be
any mammal’s, or those of any love
dispersible by wind.

Chase Twichell is the author of six books of poems and a book of translations and is the co-author of the best-selling guidebook The Practice of Poetry. She taught for several years at Princeton University before starting Ausable Press, a publisher dedicated to contemporary literature. She lives with her husband, the novelist Russell Banks, in the Adirondacks.

Chase Twichell was born in 1950 in New Haven, Connecticut, and educated at Trinity College (Hartford) and the University of Iowa. She lives in the Keene Valley in the Adirondacks, where she spent many summers and vacations during her childhood and where her father's family had gone for many generations. The two greatest influences on her life and work have been this early intimacy with wilderness followed by her years as a Zen Buddhist student of John Daido Loori at Zen Mountain Monastery in the Catskills. Her poetry books include Northern Spy (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981), The Odds (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986), Perdido (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, USA, 1991; Faber & Faber, UK, 1992, Poetry Book Society Choice), The Ghost of Eden (Ontario Review Press, USA, 1995; Faber & Faber, UK, 1996, Poetry Book Society Recommendation), The Snow Watcher (Ontario Review Press, USA, 1998; Bloodaxe Books, UK, 1999); Dog Language (Copper Canyon Press, USA, 2005; Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2006, Poetry Book Society Recommendation); and Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been: New & Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, USA, 2010; Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2010). The Lover of God (by Rabindranath Tagore, co-translated with Tony K. Stewart) was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2003. She also co-edited The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises from Poets Who Teach with Robin Behn (HarperCollins, 1992). She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Artists Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1997 she won the Alice Fay DiCastagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America for The Snow Watcher. She received a Smart Family Foundation Award in 2004. From 1976 to 1984 she worked at Pennyroyal Press, and from 1986 to 1988 she co-edited the Alabama Poetry Series, published by University of Alabama Press. After teaching for many years (at Hampshire College, the University of Alabama, Goddard College, Warren Wilson College, and Princeton University), she resigned in 1999 to start Ausable Press, a non-profit, independent literary press that she operated until it was acquired by Copper Canyon Press in 2009.

Dog Language

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