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Information Desk

An Epic

Robyn Schiff

$49.99

Paperback

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English
Penguin USA
19 September 2023
A book-length poem set in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, from a writer whose work offers ""something few poets ever discover- a vision of the whole world"" (Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker)

Named a 2024 Pulitzer Prize Finalist anda New York Times Book Review Editors' ChoicePick

""Among the year's highlights . . .groundbreaking, epic . . .

Like visitors exiting the Met's galleries, readers will emerge from Information Desk bedazzled by the transformative horizons of art.""-Washington Post

""An effluvial rush of memory, desire, data, and metaphor . . . It's bracing to encounter a mind so voracious, so unapologetic in its intelligence."" -New York Review of Books

A book-length poem set in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, from a writer whose work offers ""something few poets ever discover- a vision of the whole world"" (Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker)

Robyn Schiff's fourth collection is an ambitious book-length poem in three parts set at The Metropolitan Museum of Art's information desk, where Schiff long ago held a staff position. Elaborately mapping an interconnected route in and out of the museum through history, material, and memory, Information Desk- An Epic takes us on an anguished soul-quest and ecstatic intellectual query to confront the violent forces that inform the museum's encyclopedic collection and the spiritual powers of art.

Novelistic in its sweep, frantically informative, and deeply intimate in its private recollections, Information Desk- An Epic wayfares with riveting lyric intensity through an epic array of topics and concerns, including illusion, deception, self-deception, complicity, lecherous coworkers, the composition of pigment, the scattering of seeds, ideas, and capital, and insect infestations spreading within artwork. Along the way, Schiff pauses to invoke three terrifying muses-parasitic wasps-in desperate awe of their powers of precision and generative energy. Information Desk- An Epic undertakes a hemorrhaging ekphrastic journey through artifice and the natural world.
By:  
Imprint:   Penguin USA
Country of Publication:   United States
Dimensions:   Height: 228mm,  Width: 152mm,  Spine: 10mm
Weight:   201g
ISBN:   9780143136804
ISBN 10:   0143136801
Pages:   144
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Robyn Schiff is the author of three previous poetry collections, Worth, Revolver, and A Woman of Property, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The recipient of the 2023 Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, she is a Professor at Emory University, and co-edits Canarium Books.

Reviews for Information Desk: An Epic

Praise for Information Desk: “There is quiet humor, alongside a whiff of defiance, in Information Desk’s subtitle: 'An Epic.' An epic poem, of course, calls to mind the Greeks, the Romans, all those illustrious examples—The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, etc. The journey portrayed in Information Desk may initially appear to be more inward, but it’s no less transformative . . . Schiff turns the oft-forgotten worker behind the counter into an opportunity to ask deeper questions about the historical relationship between creativity and economics . . . Who says that the life of the woman behind the counter is not equally adventurous as an epic hero’s?” —Poetry Foundation “Schiff’s attention to class and cultural formation [...] is part of a welcome return of class-based discourses to the world of American poetry . . . ranging in intellect, gorgeously slow in its development of thought and feeling . . . [Information Desk] is so faithful to itself, so admirably assured in how it presents us its information.” —Preposition Magazine “Ecstatic, propulsive, and novelistic, Robyn Schiff’s Information Desk is a tour-de-force epic on the intricate structures of knowledge, aesthetics, and labor. Astonishingly sibylline with her syllabic constraints, Schiff is one of our most formally brilliant poets writing in American letters today.” —Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings


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