{"product_id":"information-desk-isbn-9780143136804","title":"Information Desk","description":"\u003cb\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cb\u003eNamed a 2024 Pulitzer Prize Finalist and a \u003ci\u003eNew York Times Book Review \u003c\/i\u003eEditors' Choice Pick\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Among the year's highlights . . . groundbreaking, epic . . . Like visitors exiting the Met’s galleries, readers will emerge from \u003ci\u003eInformation Desk \u003c\/i\u003ebedazzled by the transformative horizons of art.” —\u003ci\u003eWashington Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003c\/b\u003eAn\u003cb\u003e effluvial rush of memory, desire, data, and metaphor . . . It’s bracing to encounter a mind so voracious, so unapologetic in its intelligence.\u003cb\u003e” \u003c\/b\u003e—\u003ci\u003eNew York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA book-length poem set in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, from a writer whose work offers “something few poets ever discover: a vision of the whole world” (Dan Chiasson, \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e)\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRobyn Schiff’s fourth collection is an ambitious book-length poem in three parts set at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 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, \u003ci\u003eInformation Desk: An Epic \u003c\/i\u003etakes us on an anguished soul-quest and ecstatic intellectual query to confront the violent forces that inform the museum’s encyclopedic collection and the spiritual powers of art.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNovelistic in its sweep, frantically informative, and deeply intimate in its private recollections, \u003ci\u003eInformation Desk: An Epic \u003c\/i\u003ewayfares 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 muses—parasitic wasps—in desperate awe of their powers of precision and generative energy. \u003ci\u003eInformation Desk: An Epic\u003c\/i\u003e undertakes a hemorrhaging ekphrastic journey through artifice and the natural world.\u003cb\u003e\u003cu\u003ePraise for \u003ci\u003eInformation Desk\u003c\/i\u003e:\u003c\/u\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A searing yet reverent book-length poem, containing as many jokes as it does social critiques, odes to forgeries and furious passages about goatish colleagues.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“An encyclopedic poem that captures the immense experience of working, and being, at the Met . . . \u003ci\u003eInformation Desk \u003c\/i\u003eis wide-ranging . . . an effluvial rush of memory, desire, data, and metaphor . . . wryly funny . . . What is consistent across Schiff's books is an interest in the historical vignette and the artifact, their involvement in a web of social and economic relations, all of this expressed through a vocabulary and syntax that match these artifacts in elaboration and craftsmanship. It's bracing to encounter a mind so voracious, so unapologetic in its intelligence and finical grammar.” —\u003ci\u003eNew York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Not many books, let alone book-length poems, are as can’t-put-it-down propulsive as Robyn Schiff’s fourth book, \u003ci\u003eInformation Desk\u003c\/i\u003e . . . Readers of all kinds will be overwhelmed by this book’s wonders . . . You’re just going to have to visit Schiff’s museum yourself. You’re going to have such a good time.” —\u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Among the year's highlights . . . groundbreaking, epic . . . Like visitors exiting the Met’s galleries, readers will emerge from \u003ci\u003eInformation Desk \u003c\/i\u003ebedazzled by the transformative horizons of art.” —\u003ci\u003eWashington Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“There is quiet humor, alongside a whiff of defiance, in \u003ci\u003eInformation Desk\u003c\/i\u003e’s subtitle: 'An Epic.' An epic poem, of course, calls to mind the Greeks, the Romans, all those illustrious examples—\u003ci\u003eThe Iliad\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Odyssey\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Aeneid\u003c\/i\u003e, etc. The journey portrayed in \u003ci\u003eInformation Desk\u003c\/i\u003e may initially appear to be more inward, but it’s no less transformative . . . Schiff turns the oft-forgotten worker behind the counter into an opportunity to ask deeper questions about the historical relationship between creativity and economics . . . Who says that the life of the woman behind the counter is not equally adventurous as an epic hero’s?” —\u003ci\u003ePoetry Foundation\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Robyn Schiff’s work has long demonstrated that American poetry can be both ornamental and discursive, both formally inventive and intimate. But the intimacy, in her latest, is woven more explicitly—and even more movingly—into the history and science that have long been the stuff of her métier . . . these are classic Schiff poems: taking from the natural world figures that, in her skilled hands, become devastating metaphors.” —\u003ci\u003eMcSweeney's\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Schiff’s epic poem enacts its title, answering questions readers never knew they had . . . Violence and beauty, the banal and the sublime, all coexist in the same, generative space of a poem itself.” —\u003ci\u003eHyperallergic\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A study of memory as much as of art . . . Schiff orchestrates an engaging drama of consciousness that lures the reader down each page, capturing the mind’s quicksilver leaps from past to present and back again as it pings in Proustian fashion from sensory trigger to anecdote to meditation on history, science, and a panorama of other subjects treated with a mix of vulnerability and wit.” —\u003ci\u003ePoets \u0026amp; Writers\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Schiff’s attention to class and cultural formation [...] is part of a welcome return of class-based discourses to the world of American poetry . . . ranging in intellect, gorgeously slow in its development of thought and feeling . . . [\u003ci\u003eInformation Desk\u003c\/i\u003e] is so faithful to itself, so admirably assured in how it presents us its information.” —\u003ci\u003ePreposition Magazine \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[A] breathtaking sweep through personal and public history . . . Schiff has composed a fascinating poetic study of the ways that art relates to its audience.” —\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Ecstatic, propulsive, and novelistic, Robyn Schiff’s \u003ci\u003eInformation Desk \u003c\/i\u003eis a tour-de-force epic on the intricate structures of knowledge, aesthetics, and labor. Astonishingly sibylline with her syllabic constraints, Schiff is one of our most formally brilliant poets writing in American letters today.” —Cathy Park Hong, author of \u003ci\u003eMinor Feelings \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eRobyn Schiff \u003c\/b\u003eis the author of three previous poetry collections, \u003ci\u003eWorth\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eRevolver\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eA Woman of Property, \u003c\/i\u003ewhich was a finalist for the \u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003c\/i\u003e Book Prize. The recipient of the 2023 Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, she is a Professor at Emory University, and co-edits Canarium Books.","brand":"Penguin Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304543113445,"sku":"NP9780143136804","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780143136804.jpg?v=1767730045","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/information-desk-isbn-9780143136804","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}