{"product_id":"9781587294167","title":"Spar","description":"Karen Volkman’s award-winning collection \u003ci\u003eSpar\u003c\/i\u003e has as its central form a highly compressed, musical variant of the prose poem. Volkman develops a new lyric density that marries the immediacy of image-centered poetry to the rhythmic resources of prose. Her first poem begins, “Someone was searching for a Form of Fire,” and this wild urge to seek form—and thus definition—in the most uncontainable of elements propels the book forward; each poem maps the mind’s evolving positions in response to its variable and perilous encounters. Sometimes the encounter is romantic or purely carnal, a sensual landscape of human relations. At other times, nature itself has an almost humanly emotional connection to the speaker. While very much a living voice, the poems’ speaker is not a consistent self but a mutable figure buffeted by tenderness, terror, irony, or lust into elaborate evasions, exclamations, verbal hijinks, and lyric flights. As its title suggests, \u003ci\u003eSpar\u003c\/i\u003e embodies both resistance and aspiration, while its epigraphs further emphasize the simultaneous allure and danger of the unknown within the sensual and material worlds and in the mind itself.","brand":"University of Iowa Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47137876541680,"sku":"9781587294167","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781587294167_p0.jpg?v=1763807223","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781587294167","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}