Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Ruins of Nostalgia
    The Ruins of Nostalgia
    The Ruins of Nostalgia
    Ebook97 pages1 hour

    The Ruins of Nostalgia

    By Donna Stonecipher

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    What is it to feel nostalgia, to be skeptical of it yet cleave intently to the complex truths of feeling and thought? In a series of 64 gorgeous, ramifying, unsettling prose poems addressing late-twentieth- and twenty-first century experience and its discontents, The Ruins of Nostalgia offers a strikingly original exploration of the misunderstood phenomenon of nostalgia as both feeling-state and historical phenomenon. Each poem, also titled The Ruins of Nostalgia, is a kind of lyrical mini-essay, playful, passionate, analytic. Some poems take a location, memory, conceit, or object as their theme. Throughout the series, the poems recognize and celebrate the nostalgias they ironize, which are in turn celebrated and then ironized again. Written often in the fictional persona of the first-person plural, The Ruins of Nostalgia explores the rich territory where individual response meets a collective phenomenon.


    [sample poem]

    The Ruins of Nostalgia 13
    Where once there had been a low-end stationery store minded by an elderly beauty queen, there was now a store for high-end espresso machines minded by nobody. Where once there had been an illegal beer garden in a weedy lot, there was now a complex of luxury lofts with Parisian-style ivory façades. Where once there had been a bookstore and a bike shop and a bakery, there was now a wax museum for tourists. Where once there had been an empty lot there was now a building. Where once there had been an empty lot there was now a building. Where once there had been an empty lot there was now a building. Where once there had been an empty lot there was now a building. Where once there had been farms there were now subdivisions. Where once there had been subdivisions there were now sub-subdivisions. We lived in a sub-subdivision of a subdivision. We ourselves had become subdivided—where once we had merely been of two minds. * Where once there had been a river there was now a road. A vocal local group had started a movement to break up the road and "daylight" the river, which still flowed, in the dark, underneath the road. * Could we daylight the farms, the empty lots, the stationery store, the elderly beauty queen, the city we moved to? Was it still flowing somewhere, under the luxury lofts, deliquescing in the dark, inhabited by our luxury selves, not yet subdivided, because not yet whole? * Could we daylight the ruins of nostalgia?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWesleyan University Press
    Release dateOct 10, 2023
    ISBN9780819500854
    The Ruins of Nostalgia
    Author

    Donna Stonecipher

    Donna Stonecipher is a poet and translator with an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is the author of seven books of poetry including Ruins of Nostalgia, The Reservoir, The Cosmopolitan, Model City and Transaction Histories which the New York Times named a top ten collection of 2018. Her poems have been published in many journals, including The Paris Review. In 2018 she won a year-long writing grant from the Berlin Senate. She translates from German, and her translation of Austrian poet Friederike Mayrocker's etudes, for which she received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship appeared in 2020. She lives in Berlin.

    Related to The Ruins of Nostalgia

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Sep 15, 2017

      Four deer stood poised down in a valley as the train passed by, like four artworks in a museum, framed in the rectangular windows of the train, a tableau vivant that hardly changes no matter how many times the train passes, heading north or heading s

      4 min read

    • Article

      Sin

      Sep 3, 2019

      By the last week of April, the parking lot’s long chainlink fence already bristles with its hundreds of attachments: coiled wire, duct tape, butterfly clips, boat hooks, coat hangers, pellets of industrial glue, nylon strips, braided strings, and wha

      29 min read

    • Article

      Too Much, Magic Bus

      Dec 9, 2019

      Too Much, Magic Bus
      8 min read

    • Article

      Deep Roots In The Smoky Mountains

      Nov 3, 2022

      Deep Roots In The Smoky Mountains
      10 min read

    • Article

      Poetry

      Jun 1, 2021

      Poetry
      3 min read

    • Article

      Platteland Snapshots In Oils

      Aug 27, 2021

      Platteland Snapshots In Oils
      6 min read

    • Article

      Through The Eyes Of Iris

      Feb 17, 2020

      Through The Eyes Of Iris
      6 min read

    • Article

      Rooted

      May 10, 2019

      Rooted
      9 min read

    • Article

      My Interiors Life: Weaned On The Small Screen

      Nov 25, 2021

      FOR ME, IT WAS ALL DOWN TO what I saw on the box (which was a lot) — and this extended too to the arenas of action: a fantastic littering of such beautiful and extraordinary interiors, not one of which had I ever set foot in, nor even so much as glim

      9 min read

    • Article

      Roadside Paradise

      Jun 15, 2022

      Roadside Paradise
      4 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Jun 1, 2022

      Try to praise the mutilated world. Remember June’s long days, and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine. The nettles that methodically overgrow the abandoned homesteads of exiles. —Adam Zagajewski, “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” tr. by Clare C

      4 min read

    • Article

      Spellcheck

      Jan 1, 2019

      Whose history I do not know. I do know I’ve been e-upbraided for my fast and loose spelling of Woden, the god whose last worshipper must have slipped under the sod during the medieval period, somewhere in the 10th century—imagine those bog-soaked des

      5 min read

    • Article

      People Are Strange

      Oct 13, 2019

      People Are Strange
      5 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Mar 1, 2024

      I was trying to look a little less like myselfand more like other humans, humans who belonged, so I put on a skort.Purchased in another life, when I had a husband and wrote thank-you notes and held dinner parties,the skort even had its own little poc

      6 min read

    • Article

      Apparition

      Mar 26, 2020

      Apparition
      8 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems

      Jul 1, 2022

      We know that the people loved beautiful things.From their earliest kind they were fools for shineand order: necklaces strung with tiny seashells,amulets of amethyst and chalcedony. The peopleloved tall buildings with many gleaming windows;from these

      2 min read

    • Article

      Following a Thread

      Sep 19, 2019

      Following a Thread
      6 min read

    • Article

      St. Scholastica

      Dec 14, 2020

      St. Scholastica
      13 min read

    • Article

      ‘Bowlaway’: Featured Fiction from Elizabeth McCracken

      Feb 4, 2019

      What she wanted was a kind of greatness that women were not allowed. The post ‘Bowlaway’: Featured Fiction from Elizabeth McCracken appeared first on The Millions.

      12 min read

    • Article

      Table Talk

      Dec 1, 2023

      Table Talk
      8 min read

    • Article

      Six Poems

      Feb 28, 2023

      Dear C, At first Virgil’s poem is quite dull; equivocalnames of products at The Container Store: Elfa White Medium Drawer, Mesh NarrowRolling Cart (Medium Solution), Narrow Classic Mesh Box and the number of pirouetting starseach product attained. An

      5 min read

    • Article

      Table Talk

      Dec 1, 2019

      Table Talk
      12 min read

    • Article

      This Town Has Become a Museum

      Sep 21, 2021

      This Town Has Become a Museum
      6 min read

    • Article

      City of THE DEAD

      Oct 26, 2021

      City of THE DEAD
      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Ruins of Nostalgia

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Ruins of Nostalgia - Donna Stonecipher

      \ebook_preview_excerpt.htmlX]ܶ S+;JId+)*R "~! Mt|83Y@//[޽y~޼}rZ}^<?9UNgNʸUovJk* z㴽|tHjEGZߪIɮJBCwe[rI-& tzI,װ[= 1xw~LAì(>005֝գvs4R y[>\ &&Gr65ئkYhVGV;y?e0 "3D&3\b3h ԝS֤dIъf^U!…=}"nUϛz;wA÷AqpO'\8'c?pPin$! ; K>A<)y8q@DST[tîx"^hٝelNYqs_I;<*N& c&Q]pc1Oj/;ʑf?Xll#^u>g(,d{g^:~DBLV~2\j  *>wv `5w.~9 ꭬Gr֌3 PW2&߲90.wIIo~$`Wsn %W^9.吡IvHلz9&{|`"-^umۥl;y#.M#֑xDHl :â+~')CV4Ɖ#)ی~O7_o >'cC$ o"Î2<CQ}_=%#¹ =!Yrw_}YD̥qE@T3Jg|(x(R(NM5%b lՃ Yw'6 \G&t2- BS$rhM j$?OT@Aғ"8{`hSW1*=,ȣtޔ_m|sSЫyۛXޚ %A=&0ZصCbX4 GPհ#A+=Օ֌@8NGXlV6}(9{*{ M~D"p}c@LvCuaެ~&'sǻvۥD[eu|x=;NP(110L4.GnX3T#,@Zȴ6 ORH @ՅyUR(M4En'f:fd)bTl+s:rUIbGB1ݒ؝mbe Yy; wVF^SLk,BkX&]igjV]QH'R&0Xח`7eid9*ϭלzGیkePh͐QSA:>Ncdԋ2ܡ)HZ8h)^0-vK-Kl0 `Fّ?ߙ 5=fdQ.\R~&H)Ԋ4(>4KLp]6t "9'"fP4 y(8 ΩKp&#3sLGoɽuRxSKQ7由3]p;|xJu:b1­LU Ox8k(Сy&өϝ֣[z$gHczuP4)4r/ Vw?+ڎEi#^y[Pz2-TꜘBV/+F5Mb[i2 hObuUkq%?t>gxl!O96v1U6bf_.I|ޠ4jK&hG 1h:ֻ8d֜Wȅ,G]5Y@uu>-r#&e3!'&iAoHe"!3W.B
      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1