Everytime a Knot is Undone, a God is Released: Collected and New Poems 1974-2011

Barbara Chase-Riboud

Feb 2015 · Seven Stories Press

About this ebook

The long breath of Barbara Chase-Riboud's poems recalls poets of the antique world we know only from fragments, like Sappho. And yet here is a disquieting and sumptuous contemporary voice that seems to gather up antiquity and modernity with equal fervor and scorn. These poems are sexually charged, possessed of a courtly disdain and a strange nobility that seems to well up from below to be self-creating and unlike the verse of any other poet writing today.

Certainly one secret to this work is that Chase-Riboud's poems are informed by her epic, polished bronze sculptures, as her sculptures are informed by her narrative fiction, and her fiction by her poems. The idea of the Renaissance Man is almost a cliché, but how often do we get to see what it means for an artist to be a Renaissance Woman? Chase-Riboud has been a major in sculpture, fiction, and poetry for close to half a century: selling over a million copies of her path-breaking novel Sally Hemings in the late '70s, winning the Carl Sandburg Award for her second collection of poems in the late '80s, and now, nearly thirty years later, on the heels of a major retrospective of her sculpture at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Berkeley Art Museum, here is Everytime a Knot is Undone, a God is Released, her first new and collected volume of verse.

About the author

An internationally renowned sculptor, novelist, and poet, BARBARA CHASE-RIBOUD took to the arts at an early age. Born in Philadelphia in 1939, she started to play the piano, sculpt, and write poetry before entering high school. Chase-Riboud went on to receive a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Temple University and a master’s from Yale, before showing her sculptures at galleries throughout Europe and the United States. All the while Chase-Riboud was publishing her highly regarded poetry: From Memphis to Peking (1974), her first collection, was edited by Toni Morrison, and her second collection, Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra, won the Carl Sandburg Award for Poetry. But it was with the publication in 1979 of her first novel, Sally Hemings, which won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for fiction by an American woman and sparked a renewed interest in the historical Hemings, that Chase-Riboud won her most widespread acclaim. Chase-Riboud is also the author of the novels Valide (1986), The President’s Daughter (1994), and Hottentot Venus (2004), among others. She received a Knighthood in Arts and Letters from the French government in 1996 and was honored with a major survey of her sculptures and drawings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2013. Chase-Riboud lives in Paris, Rome, and New York.