Hotel Imperium
Poems
Title Details
Pages: 80
Trim size: 5.500in x 8.500in
Formats
Paperback
Pub Date: 02/01/2008
ISBN: 9-780-8203-3170-6
List Price: $20.95
Series
Related Subjects
Hotel Imperium
Poems
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- Description
- Reviews
- Awards
Fierce humor has Hotel Imperium, as well as a heady run in which Nixon and brassieres stud the trail; the whole century bends its tragedy beneath Rachel Loden’s clear intelligence. These are brilliant, moving poems—poems to read for pure joy and chills over and over from here on out.
—Susan Wheeler
Rachel Loden is not merely fashionable or current. She’s a late-century muse of everything valuable in poetry—voice, shape, gesture. Add to that a wicked sense of humor and a disarmingly fresh and penetrating eye for social and political concerns. But her poems are not political in the simple sense of the word. Loden’s poetry guarantees complexity as it charts new territory with assurance. Hotel Imperium is the debut of a startingly original writer.
—Maxine Chernoff
Steadily, with imaginative insight, humor, sarcasm, and irony, Rachel Loden looks at history. . . . In [Hotel Imperium's] corridors and rooms, Loden makes us confront many of the century’s still active ghosts. . . . Political in the very best and rarest sense of the word, Loden’s poems show us how to reimagine our (and others’) lives, with a vividness reminiscent of the "Commedia" . . . In sum: great, terrifying, insidiously beautiful work!
—Anselm Hollo
Do not be deceived: transactions with the Evil Empire recorded here are with a realm which will not alter the case, that intractable prosa mundi the Just Republic must contend with to the end: fools’ inferno, fools’ paradise. Our poet’s strategem has been to join rather than jilt her harassers, subverting from within. Daunting work, but someone had to do it—a good thing it’s this Loden woman, who has the strength of ten . . . syllables, never fear. We are inspirited.
—Richard Howard
She sends up late twentieth-century history, politics and canonical literature with a vengeance. . . . Loden is wickedly sarcastic, brilliantly ruthless—her poems are both deadly and a hoot.
—North American Review
Ablaze with moral passion, hushed in fairy-tale bliss, or chuckling up to terror, Rachel Loden’s tight poems of intricate subversion are gloriously musical, alive to each scintilla of sound and measure.
—Stephanie Strickland
Pop and politics haven't had their hats handed to them in this Popian a manner in ages. Reminiscent of the acute fantasias of Susan Wheeler and Elaine Equi, though temperamentally closer to Connie Deanovich, Loden's poems talk about what people are (or have been) talking about, but with barbs hilariously sharpened. . . . Loden's first full collection marches smartly down the path of satire.
—Publishers Weekly
No one else brings such crystalline language to absurd situations. . . . Loden uses an almost Talmudic sampling of verse and commentary to narrate a true story of falsehood, lies, and omission. . . . Information and real people are skewed and skewered in Hotel Imperium like they are in Dante's Commedia.
—Chicago Review
Runner-up
Bay Area Book Reviewers Award, Bay Area Book Reviewers Association
Winner
Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, Pushcart Press
Winner
Ten Best Poetry Books, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review