Inlibris.com RSS
in association with
  Amazon.com
 
WelcomeYour BookSame AuthorSimilarYour SearchYour History
 Find 
 
   

Recommended author
John Gregory Dunne
Apprentice to the Flower Poet Z.: A Novel
by Debra Weinstein

Cover image   Availability: Not available new from Amazon.com

Edition: Hardcover
Publisher: Random House (2004-01-20)
ISBN-10/ISBN-13: 1400061555 / 9781400061556
Amazon.com Sales Rank: 3447480
Poetry

The Fall of Arthur
J.R.R. Tolkien

Love & Misadventure
Lang Leav

Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (Bilingual Edition)
Seamus Heaney

The Odyssey (Penguin Classics)
Homer

The Prophet
Kahlil Gibran

Seuss-isms: Wise and Witty Prescriptions for Living from the Good Doctor (Life Favors(TM))
Dr. Seuss

Where the Sidewalk Ends: Poems and Drawings
Shel Silverstein

Darkness Sticks to Everything: Collected and New Poems
Tom Hennen

The Odyssey: The Fitzgerald Translation
Homer

The Essential Rumi, New Expanded Edition
Jalal al-Din Rumi

A 2004 Vacation Reading (selected by The New York Times)
“A deliciously nasty first novel featuring a great fraud of a poet (Z.) who seeks perfection of the life, leaving her work to be done by the book's real heroine, Annabelle Goldsmith, Z.'s apprentice and dogsbody, who eventually researches and even writes Z.'s poems.”

Book description
Apprentice to the Flower Poet Z. is about two women: Annabelle, an aspiring young poet from the suburbs, and Z., the celebrated mentor who tries to hold her back. It’s no accident that their initials span the alphabet, as this hilarious book is about language, writing, and the appropriation of ideas. It is also about the high-wire relations between older and younger women, between reputation and aspiration.

“There is so much I wanted to learn from Z.,” Annabelle confesses in the opening chapter. Obsessed with the question “What is poetry?” Annabelle thinks her new job with the distinguished Flower Poet Z. will help her penetrate the answer. What is revealed to Annabelle instead are the secrets of Z.’s personal life—not least, her dysfunctional family, adulterous behavior, and professional tyranny. Meanwhile, Annabelle is charged with finding Z.’s favorite ink (“jet black, not midnight black, not shoeshine black”), buying prescription cat food for a cranky literary critic, and illegally beheading flowers in the New York Botanical Gardens—anything to preserve Z.’s “psychic space.”

As for what Annabelle learns about the literary world, much of it occurs in spite of Z.—in writing seminars where one-line poems are toiled over for years; in bed with her James Joyce–fixated lover, Harry Banks; at a confessional-poetry retreat at the home of Z.’s glamorous nemesis, Braun Brown. Still, Annabelle remains loyal to Z., until Z. egregiously crosses the line.

From Annabelle and Z. to the painfully obscure Miss Jane Elliot, Emily Dickinson, and Sylvia Plath, Debra Weinstein’s Apprentice to the Flower Poet Z. amounts to a joy ride through the world of poetry and the emergence of a great new comic voice.


With Good Reviews


More info
Woman's World
Graham Rawle

Interested in a used copy? Do you need more information?

Recommend this book


RSS OPML • This site is PDA-friendlyAmazon.com prices subject to change
www.inlibris.com and www.badosa.com, idea, design and development: Xavier Badosa Go to top