Curves to the Apple

Author: Rosmarie Waldrop

Publisher: New Directions (2007)

Rosmarie Waldrop’s Curves to the Apple brings together three highly praised and influential titles: The Reproduction of Profiles, Lawn of Excluded Middle, and Reluctant Gravities. Though originally published separately, these prose poems have always been intended as a loose trilogy of thought and feeling—or of thought manifested as feeling. The author comments: “Just as the title, Curves to the Apple, combines the organic and geometry (not to mention myth and history of science) the poems navigate the conflicting, but inextricable claims of body and mind, especially the female body and feelings in a space of logic and physics. The poems could all be called dialogic, reaching out across a synaptic (sometimes humorous) gap to a possible ’you’ (though it may be rhetorical, another point of view in the same mind). But while the ’I’ dominates the first two volumes, the third gives both voices equal space and chance.”