Description
Earthquakes, Calamities, & poems from the midst of life, written by Nan Socolow
“The haiku-like spareness of Nan Socolow’s style evokes vivid imagery, fulfilling to perfection Wordsworth’s poetic ideal of ’emotion recollected in tranquility.’” Thus does Sarah-Ann Smith, author of Trang Sen: A Novel of Vietnam, describe Nan Socolow’s writing.
Among those who have read and praised Invasive Procedures is Kathrin Perutz, author of Beyond the Looking Glass: America’s Beauty Culture, and many other books. “Nan Socolow gives us poems that are short and pert, sweet and sour as if laced with passion fruit. She pounces upon certain moments, capturing them in her net when no one else is looking as Nabokov captured his butterflies.”
Joan Konner, Dean Emerita of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, writes, “Nan Socolow reaches out to touch places we don’t see and yet recognize, and in her simple words, teaches us to pay attention.”
And in the words of Jackson R. Breyer, Professor Emeritus of English at U. of Maryland, Socolow “deals often movingly, but just as frequently humorously, with the many fluctuations, the joys and sorrows, of romance, courtship, marriage, and separation,” sharing her “wry, sophisticated, and acute understanding of the … world.”
Born in New York City, where she grew up in an apartment overlooking the storied square of Gramercy Park, Nan Socolow first studied poetry at Connecticut College with William Meredith, later the U.S. Poet Laureate and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. At Princeton University, where she was the first Administrator of Rockefeller College, she studied advanced poetry with Theodore (“Ted”) Weiss, founder and publisher of Quarterly Review of Literature. In France, at the Sorbonne and Musée d’art Moderne, she studied contemporary French Literature and Art.
