The Surfacing of Excess

Arianne Zwartjes

Arianne Zwartjes grew up in mid-coast Maine. She is a wilderness EMT (Emergency Medical Technician) and teaches for the Wilderness Medicine Institute of the National Outdoor Leadership School, as well as in the writing program at the University of Arizona. She is the author of a chapbook, (Stitched) A Surface Opens (New Michigan Press/Diagram, 2008), and her writing has appeared in Caketrain, The Pinch, Cue, Diagram, Red Wheelbarrow, Front Porch, and Blue Fifth Review, among others. She lives in Tucson and is currently completing a collection of lyric essays.

Reviews

I have often thought that in the limited perception of mortals, there are only rare moments where we're capable of understanding how proofs and theories based in science can support faith in the divine. As methodical as St. Thomas Aquinas and as lyric as Rilke, Arianne Zwartjes provides truly plausible evidence of the existence of angels. Here is poetry that, to borrow a phrase from Rukeyser, walks in valvular air. There is no curve of the great void of space that is not now, for me, forever illuminated, thanks to this extraordinary new music of the spheres.

—D. A. Powell

These lively "eco-poems" take the marvelous, but endangered, species called language on a lively quest for sustenance. Arianne Zwartjes contemplates mysteries, politics, emotions, and aesthetics, indulging us with a feast of realities. The "surfacing of excess" turns out not to be a clever phrase, or a ruse, but the hard work that a beautiful mind accomplishes, thinking about life, in Zwartjes's case, in an interlinked diction of science and religion, which resolves itself in a language of love.

—Jane Miller, author of Midnight and A Palace of Pearls

Arianne Zwartjes's thoughtful, playful poems map the surfaces of language, image, flight, and architecture. Reading The Surfacing of Excess is like removing the boring part of your skull and letting the sky about your brain. Or like hanging around with the theoretical mathematicians' guild, getting goofy, drinking wine by the jug, positing geometries, speaking Greek. Ambitious, fragmented, and thinky in ways most poetry doesn't even attempt, triangulating by stars including Weil, Carson, Plato, Calvino, and Heidegger, Zwartjes is a new breed of bird in a sky filled with sameness. Part descent, part descant, always vector, in her words, herein you'll find "here / we know there is a mystery greater than beauty."

—Ander Monson, author of Neck Deep and Other Predicaments

In quest of the shape of escape, seeing liberty in the potential shapes of space, Zwartjes's elegant, intricate text poses frank questions: how can one reconcile Simone Weil and hyperbolic geometry, mathematical clarity, and personal history? And can a detailed and accurate understanding of flight compensate for our inability to fly? Zwartjes uses such questions to open an inquiry on relationship in its widest senses, employing marvelous phrasing and striking imagery to evoke our interlaced and ultimately unmappable trajectories.

—Cole Swenson, author of Ours

Ordering Information

To purchase The Surfacing of Excess by Arianne Zwartjes, please contact our distributor, University Press of New England toll free at 1-800-421-1561 or by fax at 1-603-448-9729. The book is also available online at UPNE, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other fine retailers.

To request a copy for review, please contact the Carnegie Mellon University Press Editorial Offices at (412) 268-2861 or by email at CarnegieMellonUniversityPress@gmail.com.