{"product_id":"slips-of-the-mind-jennifer-soong-9780226839899","title":"Slips of the Mind: Poetry as Forgetting","description":"\u003cb\u003eAn audacious account of what happens when forgetting becomes a way of writing and writing becomes a way of forgetting.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e In \u003ci\u003eSlips of the Mind\u003c\/i\u003e, poet and critic Jennifer Soong turns away from forgetting's long-standing associations with suppression, privation, and error to argue that the absence or failure of memory has often functioned as a generative creative principle. Exploring forgetting not as the mere rejection of a literary past or a form of negative poetics, Soong puts to the test its very aesthetic meaning. What new structures, forms of desires, styles, and long and short feelings do lapses in time allow? What is oblivion's relationship to composition? And how does the twentieth-century poet come to figure as the quintessential embodiment of such questions? \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e Soong uncovers forgetting's influence on Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian, Tan Lin, Harryette Mullen, Lissa Wolsak, and New York School poets John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Bernadette Mayer, and Ted Berrigan, among others. She reveals that forgetting's shapeshifting produces differences in poetic genre, interest, and degrees of intentionality--and that such malleability is part of forgetting's nature. Most provocatively, Soong shows how losing track of things, leaving them behind, or finding them already gone resists overdetermination and causality in the name of surprise, as poets leverage forgetting in order to replace identity with style. \u003ci\u003eSlips of the Mind\u003c\/i\u003e is the kind of literary criticism that will reward all readers of modern and contemporary poetry.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Jennifer Soong\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-10:\u003c\/b\u003e 0226839893\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9780226839899\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e University of Chicago Press\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 04\/07\/2025\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 208\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Hardcover\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 1.00lbs","brand":"Jennifer Soong","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":46617821348095,"sku":"9780226839899","price":115.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0662\/2982\/9887\/files\/img_a422507a-0c27-4fe7-9061-f5a427035269.jpg?v=1740068428","url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/slips-of-the-mind-jennifer-soong-9780226839899","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}