“Provincetown is a place both mythic and mystical, and Cynthia Huntington is a someone who gets this right. Terra Nova has the feeling of a biblical prophecy, a lost book that has washed up from the sea.” -Edward Hirsch, author, Gabriel: A Poem “Provincetown is the locus of this ambitious, wide-ranging, and archetypal collection, which takes up various histories of migration and exile and reimagines them for our time. It is one poem with many poems (some of them in prose) carried through the passionate singing rhythm of these voices, becoming the one grand poem that is the book.” -David Ferry, author, Bewilderment, and winner, National Book Award in Poetry The poet stories through many voices, from the elevated language of creation myth and prophetic rebuke, to vivid, realistic barroom scenes, hapless and violent, mediated through a voice of personal account and self-accounting. “This is a magnificent work, focused on the history of an all but sea-surrounded town. Whether chronicling the creation of the world and the first exile from the Judeo-Christian Garden of Eden or imagining the terror and thrill of the first sea voyages, this is electric poetry: challenging, startling, and fulfilling. Huntington’s approach is hybrid, oscillating between verse and lyrical prose to create a work that falls somewhere between an epic poem and a collection of lyric essays. Yet the voices here, across many times and places, refuse to give in to desolation and despair. Yet it is also a tough and vernacular work, owing as much to Patti Smith and the Clash as it does to High Modernism.Īgain and again the work shows us outsiders forced into metaphorical and literal wildernesses, whether in a retelling of the biblical Israelites lost in the desert or in stories from Provincetown, Massachusetts, where the new world struggles into being at the edge of the sea. Rich and moving, Terra Nova is a novel that challenges us to consider how love and lies, adventure and art, can intersect.In this bold and ambitious book-length poem, National Book Award finalist Cynthia Huntington explores exile and migration-what it means to lose, seek, and find home in all its iterations-through a polyphonic work, written in multiple voices and evoking the method of Hart Crane’s The Bridge or the Nighttown episode in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Viola must now decide whether to betray her husband and her lover, or keep their secret and use their fame to help her pursue her artistic ambitions. Watts and Heywoud have doctored their photos of the Pole to fake their success. And then the men return, eager to share news of their triumph.īut in her darkroom, Viola discovers a lie. As she comes into her own as an artist, she's eager for recognition and to fulfill her ambitions. She is photographing hunger strikers in the suffrage movement, capturing the female nude in challenging and politically powerful ways. Though anxious for both men, Viola has little time to pine. In Terra Nova, Henriette Lazaridis seamlessly ushers the reader back and forth between the austere, forbidding, yet intoxicating polar landscape of Antarctica to the bustle of early twentieth century London. Back in London, Viola, a photo-journalist, harbors love for them both. The year is 1910, and two Antarctic explorers, Watts and Heywoud, are racing to the South Pole. A haunting story of love, art, and betrayal, set against the heart-pounding backdrop of Antarctic exploration-from the Boston Globe-bestselling author of The Clover House.
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