Category: Adults, Art, Poetry
Language: EnglishKeywords: Museums
Written by Robyn Schiff
Read by Robyn Schiff
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged
Named a 2024 Pulitzer Prize Finalist and a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Pick
âAmong the year’s highlights . . . groundbreaking, epic . . . Like visitors exiting the Metâs galleries, readers will emerge from Information Desk bedazzled by the transformative horizons of art.â âWashington Post
âAn effluvial rush of memory, desire, data, and metaphor . . . Itâs bracing to encounter a mind so voracious, so unapologetic in its intelligence.â âNew York Review of Books
A book-length poem set in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, from a writer whose work offers âsomething few poets ever discover: a vision of the whole worldâ (Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker)
Robyn Schiffâs fourth collection is an ambitious book-length poem in three parts set at The Metropolitan Museum of Artâs 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 museumâs 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 musesâparasitic waspsâin 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.
Length: 1 hr and 54 mins
Release date: 08-15-23
Named a 2024 Pulitzer Prize Finalist and a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Pick
âAmong the year’s highlights . . . groundbreaking, epic . . . Like visitors exiting the Metâs galleries, readers will emerge from Information Desk bedazzled by the transformative horizons of art.â âWashington Post
âAn effluvial rush of memory, desire, data, and metaphor . . . Itâs bracing to encounter a mind so voracious, so unapologetic in its intelligence.â âNew York Review of Books
A book-length poem set in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, from a writer whose work offers âsomething few poets ever discover: a vision of the whole worldâ (Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker)
Robyn Schiffâs fourth collection is an ambitious book-length poem in three parts set at The Metropolitan Museum of Artâs 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 museumâs 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 musesâparasitic waspsâin 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.
Length: 1 hr and 54 mins
Release date: 08-15-23