Bonnie Costello Reviews Donna Stonecipher's Transaction Histories

At Boston Review, Bonnie Costello explains that Donna Stonecipher's new collection, "cements her reputation as master of the prose poem." Transaction Histories, published by University of Iowa Press, in keeping with her first collection, The Cosmopolitan (selected by John Yau as the 2008 National Poetry Series winner), is the work of a "global flaneur" (in Yau's words). Picking up from there: 

Though American, Stonecipher grew up partly in Tehran and has long made her home in Berlin. Imaginatively she lives in an ever-shifting, diasporic world that has no secure borders and no solid ground—a world where the ruins of old schemes of domination are crumbling and the genuine recedes into the ersatz. In Stonecipher’s work, there is nothing of the breezy, unruffled cosmopolitanism of old travel writing, of an intact I who feels at home everywhere.

Stonecipher’s poems are full of elements reminiscent of prose fiction: scene changes, multiple voices, shifting pronouns. Their central dramatic tension is between a poetic persona—who is prone to nostalgia, or looking for the timeless and the infinite—and a cosmopolitan wanderer who is drawn to variety and new encounters. Both are subject to irony, but they need each other to retain their personhood in a diverse and changing world. Stonecipher shows us our bafflement, our exposure, our nostalgia, in the uncanny images and sharp paradoxes of contemporary life. She also shows us how to take amusement, wonder, and even pleasure in our rootless condition.

Read on at Boston Review.