Lynn Emanuel Books

The Pushcart Prize is the most wonderful and rewarding annual anthology out there because, for one thing, it's the most fair--as Bill Henderson says in his introduction, there's no money here. You don't have to have written a bestseller or be in with the "New Yorker" crowd in order to be published here. All you have to do is be a good writer. Here is fiction and poetry at its rawest and purest form, from writers who write for the sake of writing, for the sheer love of it. This is a noble thing.

It's always interesting when people either love or hate something, where there's no middle ground. And in art, often people hate things because it doesn't fit their idea of what art is, which is based on that which they've seen before. I can't bear much poetry and love Lynn Emanuel's work for precisely that reason: it's not like anything else. Her voice, her format is her own--sharp, clear, and funny--you laugh because she has hit the mark so perfectly.

Lynn Emmanuel provides poetry not of self indulgence but simply of self in these two collections of poems. Her voice is strong, confident yet avoids the pitfalls of seeing meaning where there is none. That combined with the exacting but rich vocabulary make this collection one of my favorites to read, reread, and recommend to others.

Lynn Emanuel's work in this combined collection is fresh and daring. It isn't surprising that some readers find it off-putting to encounter an entirely confident voice that doesn't beg a reader's approval but marches on with the keen intellect, humor, sharp and engaging characters and stories. Additionally Emanuel's imagery challenges and re-dresses the old cherry blossoms of verse.

Lynn Emanuel's work in this combined collection is fresh and daring. It isn't surprising that some readers find it off-putting to encounter an entirely confident voice that doesn't beg a reader's approval but marches on with the keen intellect, humor, sharp and engaging characters and stories and imagery that challenges the old cherry blossoms of verse.

Emanuel is a terrifically strong writer, one America's best young mainstream poets, and this two-in-one volume holds up to -- and deserves -- close and repeated readings. The people who have given this book sophmoric, thoughtless one-star reviews are probably as pretentious and lacking in subtley as their comments.

This is an amazing early collection from one of our major poets. The diction is elegant, the images, startling, and the persona world-weary, brassy, and vulnerable all at once. I want to live in these poems.

hotel fiesta is composed primarily of free verse personal narrative poetry. Much of it deals with a recurring character's adolescence and early adulthood. While the poetry is beautifully descriptive, and describes precisely situations and scenes, the words themselves are not aurally beautiful--to me even it almost seems like creative prose with line breaks.

This is one of my favorite poetry books of all times. It is sensuous, exact, full of truth and daring honesty. The language pours like streaming sunlight into the dark of a most interesting life. I doubt if Emmanuel can ever top this one! Where do you go from here? It's jazzy & acutely moving...

Lynn Emanuel, Hotel Fiesta (University of Georgia, 1984)

I've been a fan of Lynn Emanuel's for coming up on two decades now. So when I stumbled upon this early release in a Half Price Books a few weeks back, I was ecstatic. It was everything I expected it to be-- obsessive over detail, witty, pleasantly surprising on a regular basis. Lynn Emanuel, folks, is good stuff.

"If his face were halved by shadow I would know
This was a street where an EATS sign trembled
And a Greek served coffee black as a dog's eye. "
(--"Inventing Father in Las Vegas")

Definitely worth grabbing, if you see it. **** ½

I have survived the reading of Hotel Fiesta by Lynn Emanuel I can't believe the sub-standard poetics employed by her in this book. Can American poetry survive after being afflicted by Hotel Fiesta?

"~Glad to see someone else (and Kevin Canty, no less) thinks this book is good. I read the first stanza and immediately knew it was for keeps. It's a book of poems about a book of poems, about an author of a book of poems, about the aboutness of an author making a book of poems."~ happen up front, center stage.

I saw some wonderful cagy things going on in Emanuel's first two books. But now comes THEN, SUDDENLY, which deconstructs itself word by word as it goes along, and in a very transparent manner. (The everyperson's answer to Jorie Graham will have to wait.) THEN, TO TOP IT ALL OFF the poems are flat. The life seems to have been revised right out of them. "When the reader's radar tracked me down" Emanuel writes. What happened? The answer is, You thought about it too much and the result is stiff, self-conscious poetry.

An amazing book of poems, or a book of amazing poems, or both. The bongo-madness rhythms of the voice linger in your head after you put the book down. Serious without being solemn, playful without being silly. I read this book first time through in a single sitting, and when I was done I knew that I had started somewhere and ended up somewhere else, though the precise names for either place eluded me. A very interesting, very smart, very pleasurable book.