In The Horse Fair, Robin Becker asks questions about citizenship and participation in the marketplaces—of bodies, of ideas, of objects—in which we function. She investigates how individuals marginalized by gender, religion, and sexual preference negotiate public and private spheres while inventing sustainable communities. Beginning with the great nineteenth-century French painter Rosa Bonheur, Becker has produced a number of multi-voiced, synthetic portraits, each within a framework of social history and a poetics of partiality—she speaks from the persona of Charlotte Salomon, child of assimilate, German-Jewish parents and grandparents and killed by the Nazis at the age of twenty-six; she appropriates passages from the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services; and juxtaposes them against stanzas that mourn her sister’s death and those that celebrate non-traditional families. Organized around the long meditations, other poems show Becker's dexterity with formal verse (sestina, sonnet, tercets) and her imaginative engagements with free verse.
The Horse Fair takes its name from Bonheur's monumental painting and serves as the vehicle through which Becker explores anti-Semitism, cross-dressing, and Bonheur's lifelong relationships with women. In Becker's hands, The Horse Fair transports us to the communal plaza where we come to barter and to buy, to study one another, to touch the foundation upon which we build our temporary habitations.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Two thousand varieties of plants grow in this garden
where the child on her back, conversing with the leaves,
suddenly laughs. A patchwork of light spangles
the ecstatic movements of her limbs,
as she waves and kicks at the sky.
I watch a Green Guerilla harvest tomatoes; another
tidies an orchard of cherry, peach and plum trees.
Before their industry, I feel my unemployment
is a disfigurement, not the sweet luxury I'd planned.
Because I took her for a normal child
and am embarrassed by her enormous teeth and
little howls, because she reminds me of my sister
and the epilepsy that took her from the row house streets
of childhood to the corridors of strange clinics,
I must accept my day's accomplishment:
gratitude to the volunteer who placed this child
on a tarp, by the fish pond, and shame
at my heart's refusal to acknowledge
the many forms of neglected beauty
with which we might identify, from which we run.
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Book Description Paperback or Softback. Condition: New. The Horse Fair 0.36. Book. Seller Inventory # BBS-9780822957201
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Book Description Condition: New. Becker investigates how marginalized individuals negotiate public and private spheres, while inventing sustainable communities. She also explores anti-Semitism, cross-dressing, and painter Rosa Bonheur s lifelong relationships with women.Klappentext. Seller Inventory # 898848258
Book Description Condition: New. New. In shrink wrap. Looks like an interesting title! 0.4. Seller Inventory # Q-0822957205