Sisyphus My Love: To Record a Dream in a Bathtub

Front Cover
BlazeVox [books], 2009 - Poetry - 98 pages
Poetry. SISYPHUS MY LOVE: (TO RECORD A DREAM IN A BATHTUB) is a multimedia series poem containing threads that wind, unravel and accumulate. It combines prose poetry, lyric, myth, fake myth, journal reportage, a Poetry Blog kept online, and the beginnings of novellas that do not arrive anywhere and do not return. It contains memories of digital films and photographs taken on the Mediterranean seaboard in and around a long poem about trauma, love, death and desire--and the heroic myth of a modern Sisyphus through "his" point of view as he becomes a disembodied figure after a journey to the Land of the Dead following a heart attack. And it tells a heroine's myth, that of Sisyphus' unnamed "Wife." It is she who continues the tale while her husband, that perennial trickster figure who defies the gods, dies and comes back. Part travelogue, part epic poem, SISYPHUS MY LOVE (along with TO RECORD A DREAM IN A BATHTUB) is also the record of an American Road Trip that begins in a Northeast garden but concludes along a Mediterranean shoreline--from the beaches of Nice, France, to Pompeii (the "Villas" series) to the Greca-Magna sites around Sicily. This road-book like others before it repeatedly asks the question: What is a poem? And what is a book?

About the author (2009)

Laura Hinton is the author of the poetry book, SISYPHUS MY LOVE: (TO RECORD A DREAM IN A BATHTUB) (BlazeVox), and two critical volumes, The Perverse Gaze of Sympathy: Sadomasochistic Sentiments from Clarissa to Rescue 911 (SUNY Press), and We Who Love to Be Astonished: Experimental Women's Writing and Performance Poetics (co-editor; University of Alabama).

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