Common Reads Library Marketing
0 0
Download high-resolution image Look inside

Scriptorium

Poems

Part of National Poetry Series

Author Melissa Range
Foreword by Tracy K. Smith
Look inside
Paperback
$18.00 US
| $24.00 CAN
Beacon Press
On sale Oct 18, 2016 | 96 Pages | 9780807094440
Add to cart Add to list Exam Copies

See Additional Formats
View on Edelweiss
National Poetry Series Winner

A collection of poems exploring religious and linguistic authority, from medieval England to contemporary Appalachia—with a foreword by Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith

The poems in Scriptorium are primarily concerned with questions of religious authority. The medieval scriptorium, the central image of the collection, stands for that authority but also for its subversion; it is both a place where religious ideas are codified in writing and a place where an individual scribe might, with a sly movement of the pen, express unorthodox religious thoughts and experiences.
 
In addition to exploring the ways language is used, or abused, to claim religious authority, Scriptorium also addresses the authority of the vernacular in various time periods and places, particularly in the Appalachian slang of the author’s East Tennessee upbringing. Throughout Scriptorium, the historical mingles with the personal: poems about medieval art, theology, and verse share space with poems that chronicle personal struggles with faith and doubt.
“Range’s poems show an expertise with form from sonnets to anagrams...A collection not to be missed.”
—Library Journal, Starred Review

“She avoids both folksiness and stuffiness by filling poems with incident, description, elegy, meditation, recollection, identification, and more...This book is going to dazzle a lot of poetry readers.”
—Booklist, Starred Review

“This collection, as fiercely contemporary as it is historical, is both unapologetically literary and egalitarian as hell. It’s poetry that is truly ‘...for everyone / like language, like color, like air.’”
—Birmingham Poetry Review

“Scriptorium, lush with musicality, is perhaps more sophisticated for its restraints, and her deft formal touch remains on display with sonnets, terza rima, ghazal, cento, and villanelles.”
—Appalachian Journal

“Throughout Scriptorium, Range finds the poetic in the colloquial, the past in the present, the transcendent in the immanent. Perhaps her most impressive achievement, however, is her ability to turn engagement with the long history of metrical form in English into a foundation for strikingly innovative poetic technique.”
—Cat Fitzpatrick, The Boston Review

“Each of the poems in Scriptorium is a marvel. What may likely strike you on the first read is Range’s remarkable facility with form. She moves nimbly, naturally, with comfort and acrobatic delight through the rigors of sonnets, villanelles, anagrams, cento and the like...But what you will feel more than any of this, I am certain, is an urgent usefulness. These are poems for which form is not an end in itself.”
—Tracy K. Smith, from the foreword

“Poetry is ongoing revelation, the spirit surging in new words and shapes, in fresh forms. Yet rarely have I had such a vivid sense of this as while reading Scriptorium. This is revelatory poetry of a high order. Range has a finely tuned ear, a furtive and fertile imagination, and a gloriously rooted sense of that great word-hoard, the English language itself.”
—Jay Parini, author of New and Collected Poems, 1975-2015
Melissa Range is the author of the poetry collection Horse and Rider (Texas Tech University Press, 2010) and the recipient of awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Antiquarian Society, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Fine Arts Work Center (Provincetown, MA), and the Rona Jaffe Foundation. Originally from East Tennessee, Range currently lives in Wisconsin and teaches at Lawrence University.
Melissa Range View titles by Melissa Range
Foreword
Tracy K. Smith

Verdigris

Labyrinth, Chartres

Ashburnham

A Skiff of Snow

Orpiment

Negative Theology

Kermes Red

Flat as a Flitter

Navajo Code Talkers, WWII

Tyrian Purple

Pigs (see Swine)

Ofermod

Lampblack

Fortunes of Men

Nicodemus Makes an Analysis

Biblia Pauperum

Minium

Anagram: See a Gray Pine

Solidus of the Empress Irene, AD 797–802

Incarnational Theology

Woad

Hit

Vernacular Theology: Mechthild of Magdeburg

To Swan

Ultramarine

Crooked as a Dog’s Hind Leg

All Creation Wept

The Giants’ Sword Melts

Gold Leaf

Cento: Natural Theology

Regionalism

Scriptorium

Shell White


Notes

Acknowledgments

Credits

About

National Poetry Series Winner

A collection of poems exploring religious and linguistic authority, from medieval England to contemporary Appalachia—with a foreword by Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith

The poems in Scriptorium are primarily concerned with questions of religious authority. The medieval scriptorium, the central image of the collection, stands for that authority but also for its subversion; it is both a place where religious ideas are codified in writing and a place where an individual scribe might, with a sly movement of the pen, express unorthodox religious thoughts and experiences.
 
In addition to exploring the ways language is used, or abused, to claim religious authority, Scriptorium also addresses the authority of the vernacular in various time periods and places, particularly in the Appalachian slang of the author’s East Tennessee upbringing. Throughout Scriptorium, the historical mingles with the personal: poems about medieval art, theology, and verse share space with poems that chronicle personal struggles with faith and doubt.

Reviews

“Range’s poems show an expertise with form from sonnets to anagrams...A collection not to be missed.”
—Library Journal, Starred Review

“She avoids both folksiness and stuffiness by filling poems with incident, description, elegy, meditation, recollection, identification, and more...This book is going to dazzle a lot of poetry readers.”
—Booklist, Starred Review

“This collection, as fiercely contemporary as it is historical, is both unapologetically literary and egalitarian as hell. It’s poetry that is truly ‘...for everyone / like language, like color, like air.’”
—Birmingham Poetry Review

“Scriptorium, lush with musicality, is perhaps more sophisticated for its restraints, and her deft formal touch remains on display with sonnets, terza rima, ghazal, cento, and villanelles.”
—Appalachian Journal

“Throughout Scriptorium, Range finds the poetic in the colloquial, the past in the present, the transcendent in the immanent. Perhaps her most impressive achievement, however, is her ability to turn engagement with the long history of metrical form in English into a foundation for strikingly innovative poetic technique.”
—Cat Fitzpatrick, The Boston Review

“Each of the poems in Scriptorium is a marvel. What may likely strike you on the first read is Range’s remarkable facility with form. She moves nimbly, naturally, with comfort and acrobatic delight through the rigors of sonnets, villanelles, anagrams, cento and the like...But what you will feel more than any of this, I am certain, is an urgent usefulness. These are poems for which form is not an end in itself.”
—Tracy K. Smith, from the foreword

“Poetry is ongoing revelation, the spirit surging in new words and shapes, in fresh forms. Yet rarely have I had such a vivid sense of this as while reading Scriptorium. This is revelatory poetry of a high order. Range has a finely tuned ear, a furtive and fertile imagination, and a gloriously rooted sense of that great word-hoard, the English language itself.”
—Jay Parini, author of New and Collected Poems, 1975-2015

Author

Melissa Range is the author of the poetry collection Horse and Rider (Texas Tech University Press, 2010) and the recipient of awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Antiquarian Society, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Fine Arts Work Center (Provincetown, MA), and the Rona Jaffe Foundation. Originally from East Tennessee, Range currently lives in Wisconsin and teaches at Lawrence University.
Melissa Range View titles by Melissa Range

Table of Contents

Foreword
Tracy K. Smith

Verdigris

Labyrinth, Chartres

Ashburnham

A Skiff of Snow

Orpiment

Negative Theology

Kermes Red

Flat as a Flitter

Navajo Code Talkers, WWII

Tyrian Purple

Pigs (see Swine)

Ofermod

Lampblack

Fortunes of Men

Nicodemus Makes an Analysis

Biblia Pauperum

Minium

Anagram: See a Gray Pine

Solidus of the Empress Irene, AD 797–802

Incarnational Theology

Woad

Hit

Vernacular Theology: Mechthild of Magdeburg

To Swan

Ultramarine

Crooked as a Dog’s Hind Leg

All Creation Wept

The Giants’ Sword Melts

Gold Leaf

Cento: Natural Theology

Regionalism

Scriptorium

Shell White


Notes

Acknowledgments

Credits

Additional formats

Other books in this series

Penguin Random House Library Marketing

© 2025 Penguin Random House

Back to Top
0
    • 0
    Wish List (0)
    • More Websites from
      Penguin Random House
    • Common Reads
    • Library Marketing