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    Chinese Whispers: Poems
    Chinese Whispers: Poems
    Chinese Whispers: Poems
    Ebook136 pages1 hour

    Chinese Whispers: Poems

    By John Ashbery

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    John Ashbery’s restless, witty meditation on aging and the music of change: A must-read collection from America’s greatest modern poet

    The child’s game Chinese Whispers, known in America as Telephone, is an exercise in transforming the recognizable into something beautifully strange. John Ashbery’s twenty-fourth collection of poems, Chinese Whispers, re-creates in every line the accidentally transformative logic of the language game for which the book is named. In sixty-three charged and often very funny poems, Ashbery confronts the relentlessness of age and time while demonstrating, in his unmistakable, self-reflexive style, the process by which a single thought unravels, multiplies, distends, travels, and finally arrives, changed and unfamiliar.
     
    First published in 2002, shortly after Ashbery’s seventy-fifth birthday, Chinese Whispers is a collection in which fairy tales, mysteries, and magic dollhouses interleave effortlessly with the everyday of pancakes and popular culture. Ashbery’s language is absolutely recognizable from modern life as it is experienced, but at the same time is as dreamlike and disquieting as intercepted transmissions from another world. 
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateSep 9, 2014
    ISBN9781480459014
    Chinese Whispers: Poems
    Author

    John Ashbery

    <p><strong>John Ashbery </strong>was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927. He wrote more than twenty books of poetry, including <em>Quick Question; Planisphere; Notes from the Air; A Worldly Country; Where Shall I Wander; </em>and <em>Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, </em>which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. The winner of many prizes and awards, both nationally and internationally, he received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation in 2011 and a National Humanities Medal, presented by President Obama at the White House, in 2012. Ashbery died in September 2017 at the age of ninety.</p>

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    3.5/5

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    • 3/5
      Another decent collection of poetry by John Ashbery. I found this, especially some of the more prosaic pieces, to be effectual and open-ended- ripe for devouring literary flavour. Overall, a good book of poetry.3 stars.

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    Chinese Whispers - John Ashbery

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