SOUVENIR DE CONSTANTINOPLE

by Donna Stonecipher

Poetry. SOUVENIR DE CONSTANTINOPLE, Donna Stonecipher's second book, is "a seductively paced travelogue--both exotic and erotic--where traveler is lover and tourist, materialist and pilgrim, voyeur and poseur and where the self is bartered in exchange for a glimpse of otherness...[T]he impossible quest for self and other was never so luxurious--the letter home never more admirably adressed"-Martin Corless-Smith. Stonecipher is the author of The Reservoir, which won the 2002 University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series Competition.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

A “love poem to travel and the exotic” that creates a Cornell box-like travelogue out of a distinctly Continental nostalgia for the sensual East, all magic lamps & antimacassars & “thousands of intermediary perfumes.” The writing indulges in the metaphoric possibilities of the foreign, so that Constantinople and the tourist, the everyday “home” self and the longing for self-estrangement, resolve into an algebra where desire equals exactly desire, or its ornate little markers, the souvenirs of having once been subjunctive.

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is amazing to me to see how a change in poems' form can change how it's read. The poems in Stonecipher's Constantinople have the same vivid and imaginative power to them, they even work with a similar theme as The Cosmopolitan, and they accumulate meaning over the course of the book. But in the clipped couplets this book uses, I just don't feel that they gain the same traction as the poems in The Cosmopolitan and The Reservoir.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another Instance Press book!