Applause
Copyright © 1989
by Carol Muske
University of Pittsburgh P
How to Buy
|
Many contemporary poems stage a war between simple and complex styles
— a battle in which "simplicity" incarnates the virtues of nature,
and "complexity" bears the curse of the sterile and the
insincere. Carol Muske, however, nimbly negotiates between these
two poles. Though she tends to be straightforward, her fourth poetry
collection, Applause,
also risks artifice, relinquishes plainness and
reaches toward the rhetorical. She tempers glib candor with a
recognition that language is inevitably
impeded and enriched by all that resists easy saying. —
Wayne Koestenbaum, New York Times
Book Review
|
Camouflage
Copyright © 1975
by Carol Muske Dukes
U of Pittsburgh P
How to Buy
|
Lies, wishes, fantasies —
all the weaponry of compassionate imagination at war with society —
deploy with delicious satire in Muske's first book.
— Library Journal
|
Dear Digby
Copyright © 1989
by Carol Muske Dukes
Doubleday
How to Buy
|
Miss Lonelyhearts comes of age in this novel — anarchic, energetic, heady: rude
and poetic — take your choice of adjectives but read the book! — Fay Weldon
Carol Mukes-Dukes, one of our most gifted poets and critics, has here turned her talents to
fiction, and the result is by turns moving and amusing, and always engaging. — T
Coraghessan Boyle
Pull up your socks, Rabelais! Pack your suitcase, Swift! Get out of the road, Miss
Lonelyhearts! ...
Carol Muske-Dukes has written a hilariously comic novel about men, women, and journalism
whose harpoon leaves no ox ungored or cow unscarred. — Leo Braudy
Carol Muske-Dukes is acerbic, original, surreal, bizarre and utterly engaging. To read
Dear Digby is to simultaneously reach for the jar of painkillers and laugh
yourself into a giddy stupor. — Carolyn see
Carol Muske-Dukes' sizzling debut is a tragic-comedy at its best. ... This is a wonderfully
written novel! — Howard Norman
Funny and touching about women and craziness. It's Nathaniel West with better jokes. —
David Freeman
Carol Muske-Dukes depicts a touching world where sane and insane converge, producing
a kind of literary King of Hearts. ... This is the saddest, funniest, most
irreverent novel I've read in years. — Mary Morris
Dear Digby's vitality is infectious. ... filled with great wisecracking humor. ... It
is a comic testament to the crazy hopefulness of women. — Atlanta
Journal-Constitution
Gently satiric ... sassy ... thrives on wisecracks and one-liners. ... This nifty contrivance
of a novel well embodies its anarchic spirit. — Kirkus Reviews
Muske-Dukes is a fine stylist. Her sculpted images and energetic prose make her storytelling
vivid and compelling. — Los Angeles Times Book Review
Dear Digby is a hilarious romp, even with its serious undercurrent. —
Modern Maturity
If books were food, this one would be a Snickers candy bar: full of nuts, hard to put down,
quickly consumed ... Dear Digby is lipstick slapstick ... a ribald romp ...
[but] the thought lingers that "crazy" behavior can spring from truths, not delusions,
and is worthy of our serious attention. — St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Dear Digby is about love and forgiveness, written with wit and style. ...
Non-exclusionary, very human ... refreshing. — San Diego Tribune
Carol Muske-Dukes has written a zany, late-twentieth century Miss Lonelyhearts.
... A fast-paced romp through a few months of the life of Willis Jane Digby ... a very
entertaining read. ... Ultimately, Dear Digby is an optimistic answer to the grimness
of Miss Lonelyhearts. — San Francisco Chronicle
Muske-Dukes portrays her characters with oddball humor as well as humanity. Dear
Digby is filled with comic flights grounded in social issues. ... One finishes
Dear Digby ... moved ... admiring. — New York Newsday
Funny, sad, and highly recommended. — Library Journal
This silly, sentimental valentine of a book is saved by Muske-Dukes's natural flair for comedy. — Publishers
Weekly
...a truly original work of fiction,
something fresh — the exploration of a subculture that's
baffling, often intimidating, to most of us, and
usually ignored by American literary novelists. — Tom
DeHaven, New York Times Book Review
Life is no picnic for Willis Jane Digby. The heroine and narrator of Carol
Muske-Dukes's entertaining
first novel, Dear Digby, edits the letters column for
Sisterhood magazine ("a bimonthly cross between
a feminist Time and a liberated Ladies Home Journal with an
all-woman staff"); lately the letters,
particularly those from both male and female crazies, have begun
to drive her, well, crazy. She's begun
to see something of herself and her own perceptions of the world
in letters from, for example, a woman
who puts cat food in her husband's cereal every morning, or a
woman who writes to complain of being
sexually harassed by the bald man on the label of a cleaning
product. Digby, like Nathanael West's
Miss Lonelyhearts, her literary ancestor, finds these missives
from the outer limits of sanity less and
less amusing; she begins to take them seriously. On days when
she's feeling "in the mood to respond to
the Loonies," she dons a tuxedo and a pair of floppy rabbit
ears. The outfit makes her feel "like a radio
tower....I pull everybody in" and, at the same time,
protected. "People look, laugh uncertainly, then
watch their step with me."....Dear Digby is a blend of social
satire,
war between the sexes and mystery thriller. In part, the book is
a paean to the virtues of having a "crazy safety valve,"
particularly for women. The unusual letters
Digby publishes are intended to show how women who are "not on
the political barricades" have found
ways to deal with their frustrations. "Male crazies," Digby
explains, "come in predictable (often boring)
wrappers, but the women are chattier, more distracted from the
solemnity of dementia...weirdly hopeful in a hopeless world....[Muske-Dukes]
has written a novel full of sharp insights
and surprising images....She is particularly good at
writing amusing hit-and-run portraits." —
Stephen McCauley, New York Times Book Review
Muske-Dukes is a fine stylist. Her sculpted images
and energetic prose make her
storytelling vivid and compelling....[her]
brilliance...lies in its disturbing
redefinition of an American vocabulary. What
we had called Manifest Destiny, rugged individualism,
freedom...was by another
name, loneliness, alcoholism, and the edge of madness. —
Linsey Abrams, Los Angeles Times
Book Review
Once you've opened Dear Digby, it has to be sandblasted out of your hands before
you can resume anything resembling normal life. — The Washington Post Book World
|
Life After Death
Copyright © 2002
by Carol Muske-Dukes
Random House
How to Buy
|
"Why don't you just die?" Boyd Schaeffer asks her husband, Russell, one night during a fight.
The next day, he does just that. Russell was rich, sensitive, charming, but always
unreliable and it is not clear to Boyd what emotional legacy his untimely death has
bequeathed her.
Boyd already has a complicated relationship to death. A former obstetrician, she fled
both her profession and New York City when one of her patients died. Back then, she'd
escaped with Russell to settle in Minnesota. Now, she embarks (along with her small
daughter) on a journey into the underworld — ajourney of grief, self-reproach, and
self-discovery so profound and surprising that her individual life in its quiet
midwestern setting takes on the universal lineaments of myth. Boyd's companions
on this journey into the shadow world between existence and nonexistence include
a lonely undertaker; an unconventional embalmer, who demonstrates his trade for her;
and her own daughter, who offers a child's instinctive wisdom about life's mysteries.
With their help and her own persistence and courage, Boyd begins to understand that
endings are often also beginnings, that the Book of Life and Death is constantly being
rewritten before our eyes. — from the jacket
Carol Muske-Dukes's writing is filled with poignancy and humor, achieved through her
understanding of what it means to encounter death through the peculiar circumstance of
being alive. — Steve Martin
In her passionate novel Life After Death, Carol Muske-Dukes takes us right up against
the edge where all lives end. Her prose is stunning, as always; and her fusion of grief
and laughter and rage is extraordinary. — Ursula Hegi
Daring and full of surprises, this story takes on the big questions and holds them up to
the light, examining them, shifting them. We see life after death and life before death
from many angles. In scenes rendered with crisp, lucid prose, we are given a range of
perspectives on being human; some are recognizable and some are entirely new.
— Elizabeth Strout
Life After Death is a brave novel that offers a panorama about love, hate, birth, and
death. Carol Muske-Dukes tells her story in scintillating nuances and shades, for it is
her contention that nothing certainly not death is ever black-and-white.
— Lisa Zeidner
Muske-Dukes, who is also a poet (An Octave Above
Thunder, etc.), has shaped an exquisitely written tale with raw emotional appeal, a
deeply humanistic story of death, grief and survival. 5-city author tour. — Publishers
Weekly
As in Saving St Germ (1993), her characters are charismatic, and her musings
on grief, ritual, the quandaries of abortion, and questions of responsibility charge this
riveting, gently humorous, and prismatically beautiful novel. — Booklist
(starred review)
... her latest work of fiction is filled with lyric and graceful moments. —
Kathryn Harrison, New York Times Book Review
|
Married to the Icepick Killer
Copyright © 2002
by Carol Muske-Dukes
Random House
How to Buy
|
Poetry and Hollywood seem like the ultimate odd couple, and once upon a time the accomplished poet, novelist, and
critic Carol Muske-Dukes might have agreed. But no longer.
This is a collection of real-life adventures and meditations on literature and landscape. In Married to the Icepick
Killer, Muske-Dukes explores the uniquely Southern Californian approach to poetry, including the random appearance
of poems by Emily Dickinson and others on L. A. billboards; the hiring of poet-consultants to “top off” the final scene
of a submarine action film; and the wonder of teaching a genius surfer poet. She also illuminates the pure poetry of
falling in love with actor David Dukes, who introduced her to the City of Angels and its poetic paradoxes. Poets from
Dickinson to Brecht, Robinson Jeffers, Arna Bontemps, and Randall Jarrell make appearances in these pages, and are
seen in rapid close-up as the author reveals her talent as “camera,” witness, and learned and intrepid adventurer
and social critic.
Muske-Dukes is a wise and hilarious diviner of correspondences and contradictions. In Married to the Icepick
Killer (the title is taken from Muske-Dukes’s wry, loving remembrance of her late husband’s exceedingly varied
career), she provides a geographical (and commercial) context for cultural counterpoint and shows how it both
complements and collides head-on with a poet’s sensibility. — from the jacket
If poetry thrives on solitude and odd brushes with reality, what better place for a poet than Los Angeles, where no one
knows you exist and your neighbor’s garden fence is topped with multiple copies of Michelangelo’s David? In these clever,
engaging, beautifully written essays, Carol Muske-Dukes writes of teaching poetry to surfers, living on a street that
regularly turns into a movie set, and staying loyal to the word in the kingdom of the visual. — Katha Pollitt,
author of Subject to Debate
A modern-day Poetics for Los Angeles and beyond, Married to the Icepick Killer is funny, tough, learned, and
lyrical. Whether reporting on the breaking news of a Grecian ode or the semiotics of a cocktail party in Brentwood,
Muske-Dukes is scarily smart, and wise. — Sandra Tsing Loh, author of A Year in Van Nuys
A writer of depth, precision, and wit in her poetry and novels,
which include Life after Death, Muske-Dukes turns
out to be a piquant essayist. — Booklist
|
An Octave Above Thunder
Copyright © 1997
by Carol Muske
Penguin
How to Buy
|
An Octave Above Thunder presents a
collection of poems spanning more than twenty years in the career of
Carol Muske, who has won acclaim for work which marries
sophisticated intelligence, emotional resonance, and technical
craft. What most distinguishes Carol Muske’s poetry is her
awareness of the complicated web into which the personal and
the political, the familial and the feminist, are woven. Filled with
audible contemplation — invocation, echo, dreamsong,
dirge — Muske’s lyrical precision, assured touch, and exacting
clarity make her one of the most talented poets of her generation. —
from the jacket
[T]he current collection includes the terrific new sequence from which
the book takes its title, the ten-part poem "An Octave Above Thunder."
Beginning in a storm cellar in Minnesota, where her mother's inexpert
recitation of poetry triggers the poet's meditation on poetic voice, the
sequence zigzags across time and space: a stunt horse trained to fall on
a Santa Fe movie set shows the poet "how to unbalance what is built into
the heart"; a wild and potentially suicidal car ride through Western
mountains reminds her "You just slide out of the self — then fly."
It ends with a nod towards Marina Tsvetaeyeva — a line ("The poet's
voice is heard a long way off"), an evocation of her suicide, and the
enigma of translation, which allows individual words, but not the poet's
inimitable intonation, to pass through the barrier of separating
languages. "Let us praise a long way off, the long shadows / in a poet's
voice," Muske writes.
Where are Muske's shadows? Her poetry seems often to try to find
transcendence in the midst of injustice, cruelty, and failures of human
spirit; in the violence of Los Angeles, of the war in Czechoslovakia, of
the inmates and gang members and "troubled youth" whose participation in
poetry workshops is chronicled in a number of these poems. —
Hungry Mind Review
The poet who walks these pages isn't a poet of ecstasy and exuberance
but, in a lineage that extends back in this century to the later Yeats, a
poet
of responsibility. Her diction is clear and distinct; her stanzas are well
formed and Cartesian; her poems develop with a kind of classical
inevitability; and, especially in her more recent work, she occasionally
exhibits a full-blown, stately formalism.
An Octave Above Thunder presents a collection of poems spanning more
than twenty years in the career of Carol Muske, who has won acclaim for
work that marries sophisticated intelligence, emotional resonance, and
technical craft. This volume brings together new poems and a generous
selection of work from Muske's five previously published collections....In
a poem called "Dream" in Carol Muske's new book, the speaker finds
herself "locked out, / on the
snowy fire escape, looking through / the glass at my life."
This image offers a defining metaphor for the
rest of the book. An Octave Above Thunder is a volume of new
and selected poems culled from over
two decades of writing; it's an act of self-scrutiny by a poet
in midstream and also an invitation to
readers to peer over her shoulder and look at what she has made
of herself as a writer, to think about
her choices and compulsions and trace her evolution. — New York
Times Book Review
Poetry of beauty and integrity that tells the truth of art. — The Nation
Ah, that wonderful, rare thing: a poet who has the ability to deepen the secrets of experience even while revealing them.
— Los Angeles Times Book Review
|
Red Trousseau
Copyright © 1993
by Carol Muske Dukes
Viking
How to Buy
|
Carol Muske has been called one of the best poets of her generation. The Pulitzer
Prize-winning poet, Carolyn Kizer,
commented that her technical dazzle and virtuosity are "one of a kind: Mozartian."
The poems in her new collection,
Red Trousseau, use Los Angeles as a symbol for the seduction of appearances; in
the title poem, reality crosses
from the Wallace Stevens notion of the sun "hovering in its guise of impatient tribunal"
to a director's reshooting of a
tarnished sunset, so that "the scene, infinite, rebegins." In Carol Muske's work, red,
blue, and yellow dominate, serving
to link such disparate things as a soundstage's fake prie dieu, a precinct station map
of gang activity, and a schoolgirl's
model of the planets, all of which take on the red of Salem burnings, the self-immolation
of a political dissident in Prague,
and Eros itself, moving like a red shadow over the body of love. Fate in Red Trousseau is
drawn by a biochemist as a
chemical, recodable spiral inside us, looping back and forth like a mobius of DNA or a
movie reel; like a director or a lover,
a rebeginning. Muske's Hollywood, also deriving much of its spiraling energy from another
modernist, Marianne Moore,
circles around its version of reality, infinitely rebeginning, until it becomes wholly the
form. Life is made into an object —
beautiful, but no longer life. Until, of course, the writer begins a new story, spiraling
around a new apprehension of the world
that is dangerous, political, and most of all, erotic. Stylistically brilliant and
emotionally resonant, the poems in
Red Trousseau display the work of a master poet at the peak of her craft. —
from the jacket
Carol Muske-Dukes achieves the insight, emotional accuracy, and terrifying sureness of moral discernment she has
always sought. She surveys human relations with an acid clairvoyance through which the reckless currents of personal
and cultural history course, ripping away all but the essential tones of the human conversation. — Jorie Graham
Muske's poems have an eerie style and wit; they glow with a sophisticated intelligence
that is elegantly displayed in deft
word choice and nimble technical effects. — Library Journal
... pure, taut style. — Publishers Weekly
The world in Red Trousseau is also dark and threatening. Carol Muske
elects to confront it directly in
order to clarify, neutralize and, where possible, transform it.
Her intention is announced in "To the
Muse," the powerful opening poem, in which a "drunken girl,"
dancing topless on a pleasure boat before
an audience of sailors on an aircraft carrier, initiates a
meditation on "the sex of politics," the nature of
narrative, war and the subjugation of women....This collection
oscillates between "the worst of it" and the dream of trying somehow,
through intelligence, understanding and imagination, to "make it
right."....Ms Muske's metaphorical explorations and interrogations unfold
swiftly, often in the form of
sequences. "Red Trousseau" — the title alludes to a witch's
execution at the stake, "the flames wrapped
/ about her like a red trousseau" — is a five-part sequence in
which the mundane reality of a man and a
woman seated at a table dissolves in the intensity of the
speaker's revivification of a martyred woman
of the past. — New York Times Book Review
|
Saving St Germ
Copyright © 1995
by Carol Muske Dukes
Penguin
How to Buy
|
Having made her fictional debut with a book so compulsively readable "it has to be
sandblasted out of your hands" (The Washington Post Book World), Carol Muske Dukes
gives us a new novel that is even more engrossing — and also funny, sad, and ceaselessly
provocative. Esme Charbonneau is a brilliant chemist who teaches at the University of Greater
California, in a suburb of Los Angeles. She's married to a technical director for television
and has one child, Olivia, who has been described by one or two clinicians as "autistic,"
but who really isn't — she's an odd child, a creative child, definitely unlike other
children; but not impaired, just indefatigably herself.
Esme has been chemically "deconstructing" the world for some time now. It seems she's
taken refuge in chemistry psychologically to the extent that she is finding it harder and
harder to stay focused on the "real" world. She can't stop taking things apart
chemically —
food, cosmetics, people's faces. What she is afraid is a kind of scientific nervous
breakdown is, in fact, the very seeds of brilliant theoretical inspiration.
What happens to Esme is this: her marriage breaks up, her child gets sick, she has trouble
keeping up at work, eventually she loses her job. The irony of her demise is that it comes at
just the
moment that she is strongest, most herself. She makes an important research discovery at the
precise moment she is fired by her university. She discovers information about her past, renews
her relationship
with her mother, and reaches a point of insight into her child's character, as well as her own.
What happens to Esme doesn't happen because she is crazy, but rather because she is a
powerful, unusual, creative woman who begins to live her life the way she must, the only way
she can. On the one hand, she is extraordinary. On the other, she is part of the new, growing
class of "ordinary" women who are single mothers, heads of households, involved in careers.
Where theoretical
science and domestic life come together, where Esme carves out a life for herself and her
daughter — that is where the heart of the story beats. Her eloquence misheard as madness,
her most deeply held beliefs brought into question, Esme Charbonneau becomes as unlikely
— and most appropriate — a heroine as we're likely to see for a long time, in this
masterful novel whose subversive wit is edged with razors. — from the jacket
A prescient novel for the 1990s. — New York Newsday
Accomplishes just what art is supposed to accomplish: it makes the world new.
— The New Yorker
|
Sparrow
Copyright © 2003
by Carol Muske Dukes
Random House
How to Buy
|
Sparrow, a luminous new volume of poetry by acclaimed poet, novelist, and critic Carol Muske-Dukes, draws the
reader into a mesmerizing
world of love and loss. In the wake of personal tragedy, the death of her husband, Muske-Dukes asks herself the
questions that undergird all of art,
all of elegy. “What is the difference between love and grief?” she asks in a poem, finding no answer beyond the
image of the sparrow, flitting from
Catullus to the contemporary lyric.
Beyond autobiographical narrative, these are stripped-down, passionate meditations on the aligned arts of
poetry and acting, the marriage of two
artists and their transformative powers of expression and experience. Muske-Dukes has once again shown herself
to be, in this profound elegiac
collection, one of today’s finest living poets.
— from the publisher
Marriage is a pact with an other both beloved and unknowable — and loss, therefore, means losing both what
we know and what we can never
circumscribe. Sparrow is a stunning elegy for the actor David Dukes, but like all great poetry, it reaches
beyond the specifics of a life, or a death. In
poems haunted by Lear and Godot, Catullus and Oscar Wilde, a chorus of shades, art’s animating phantoms, ghost
this brooding, loving book into
startling life. — Mark Doty
A private matter Sparrow may invoke, but it reaches to the center of so much loss — personal and public.
— Adrienne Rich
Sparrow is an act of retrieval, a way of reviving David Dukes through memory. The lines of the poems are, in
effect, life-lines, and within them he
is brought back into a second life, one that will last. Mark Strand
Sparrow is a powerful, compelling journey from the loss of a personal paradise to the regaining that follows.
Carol Muske-Dukes shows us how
grief can be stabilized by craft and sense brought to bear on anguish, one careful line of poetry at a time. —
Billy Collins
Dedicated to her late husband, the actor David Dukes, Muske-Dukes's seventh collection of poems follows Married to
the Icepick Killer: A Poet in Hollywood
(a collection of critical and autobiographical essays) and the novel Life After Death, and is devoted to poems of
mourning. ...
The best poems capture the darkly ambiguous ruminations of a partner left behind, with an imagination has been
turned upside down.
... It is a process that, often enough, readers will find tensely drawn and heartbreaking. — Publishers
Weekly
|
Women and Poetry
Copyright © 1997
by Carol Muske Dukes
U of Michigan P
How to Buy
|
With critical insights buoyed by her poet's gifts for metaphor and wit,
she effectively places women at the center of what is most exciting about
poetry today. — Gardner McFall, New York Times Book Review
|
Wyndemere
Copyright © 1985
by Carol Muske
University of Pittsburgh P
How to Buy
|
The linkage of blood and blood; the hummingbird symbol of all
that is luminous, swift and ephemeral;
the light, sure touch — these are characteristic of Carol
Muske's art. — Carolyn Kizer, New York Times Book Review
...honed and consciously crafted. ... she's discovered a way to
work magic within the boundaries of technical
achievement. Her contemplation of experience is personal
yet moves further, into the
spiritual and philosophical; then it belongs not only
to the poet but to all of us. — Holly Prado, Los Angeles Times
Carol Muske's collection of criticism (many of these pieces were
first published in The New York
Times Book Review) spans two decades of reflection on
contemporary poetry by women who are
writing outside the male literary tradition. Her long essays
address, among other topics, the evolution
and influence of poets like Adrienne Rich (the "Great Outlaw
Mother") and Eavan Boland; her short
reviews appraise books by Maxine Kumin, Jane Kenyon, Ellen
Bryant Voigt and others. In her
thought-provoking introduction and epilogue, Muske dissects the
term "woman poet," traces the change
in what has been meant by it since the 1950's, and wrestles with
questions of testimony, autobiography
and truth in relation to female identity and experience. With
critical insights buoyed by her poet's gifts
for metaphor and wit, she effectively places women at the center
of what is most exciting about poetry
today. Gardner McFall, New York Times Book Review
Ironic yet sincere, meditative but oblique, ... [Muske is] never bombastic, isn't too self-consciously literary,
understands form,
doesn't make syntactic blunders, and is sparing in her use of adjectives. Surprisingly, however, despite such trendy
credentials,
she's much of the time very good. ... Theworks we encounter in this volume aren't just smoothly finished, they're
often freshly
imagined. ... Throughout, her explorations of often, by now cliched encounters (the raped friend, the wedding ceremony)
are
consistently interesting and lively. Most frequently, moreover, what makes them so is a carefullycultivated gift for
phrase-making
that converts accurate observation into decisive declaration. — Poetry
|
What the Critics Say
