{"product_id":"9781574410839","title":"A Protocol for Touch (Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry)","description":"\u003cp\u003e\"Constance Merritt is a poet to defeat categories, to oppose 'the tyranny of names' with a poetry that sets its own terms of encounter, its 'protocols of touch'--tender and austere, formal and intimate at once. Hers is a voice with many musics, sufficiently rich, nuanced and various to express, maintain poise and wrest meaning from the powerful cross-currents in which the heart is torn. I have seldom seen intelligence equal to such a scorching degree of intensity, or mastery of form so equal to passion's contradictory occasions. Merritt's prosodic range is prodigious--she moves in poetic forms as naturally as a body moves in its skin, even as her lines ring with the cadenced authority of a gifted and schooled ear. Here, in her words, the iambic ground bass is in its vital questioning mode: \"The heart's insistent undersong: how live?\/how live? How live?\" this poetry serves no lesser necesssity than to ask that.\"--Eleanor Wilner Between us, how we wrestle over words  Strain to wring some blessing from the silence,  Deliverance from violence, its fear, its lure,  The tyranny of names: night day,  Sable and alabaster, flint shale,  Steel and lace. Who among us can afford  To speak the language--any language--rightly?  As if it weren't enough to bear one heart  Eternally divided in its chambers?  We stand close enough to touch. We do  Not touch. Between us burns a sword of fire,  A rusted turnstile glinting in the sun.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"University of North Texas Press,U.S.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45486703935567,"sku":"00000_00000_00000_00000","price":453.0,"currency_code":"TWD","in_stock":true}],"url":"https:\/\/kinokuniya.com.tw\/products\/9781574410839","provider":"Books Kinokuniya Taiwan","version":"1.0","type":"link"}