The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience Horror Book Review

  In her six collections of poetry, Ann Lauterbach has won acclaim for poems that explore   the ways in which language simultaneously omits and defines our experience of reality.  Lauterbach’s dazzling range of formal strategies, her search for methods that engage   contemporary issues of identity, event, and description extend to her prose writings,  collected for the first time in The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of   Experience. At the center of this new book are a series of seven essays, originally   written in the mid-1990s, which engage the interstices between poetics, politics, and   memoir. Lauterbach advocates an active engagement with language, at once imaginative,  philosophical, and practical; these writings demonstrate a radical relationship between   how and what we know. By turns meditative and polemical, lyrical and descriptive, they   argue for the centrality of art in a democratic society. 

  Also included in this wide-ranging collection are brilliant, provocative essays on   Whitman and Emerson, illuminating remarks on poets Fanny Howe, Michael Palmer,  Rosmarie Waldrop, and Barbara Guest, as well as considerations of artists David Smith,  John Currin, and Joe Brainard.