Date: Oct 19, 2011

Professor Janet Kaplan Publishes New Poetry Collection

"Dreamlife of a Philanthropist" - Winner of the 2011 Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry

Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY …  Dreamlife of a Philanthropist, the third poetry collection by Hofstra University Adjunct Assistant Professor of English Janet Kaplan, has been published and awarded the Ernest Sandeen Prize by the University of Notre Dame Press.
 
Professor Kaplan is also the author of The Groundnote, winner of the New York/New England competition from Alice James Books, and The Glazier’s Country, winner of the Poets Out Loud Prize from Fordham University Press. Her poems, prose poems, and prose sonnets have appeared in many journals, on line and in print, including American Letters & Commentary, Denver Quarterly Review, and The Paris Review. She has been awarded a Fellowship in Poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Godot Grant in poetry from Rattapallax Press, a grant from the Vogelstein Foundation, and residency fellowships from Yaddo, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and others. A fourth poetry collection, Forgery, is in progress. She has served as Poet in Residence at Fordham University and has been a member of the creative writing faculty at Hofstra since 1996.

Additionally, Professor Kaplan is the editor and publisher of Red Glass Books, whose first publication, Swimming to America, a limited-edition chapbook by Patricia Spears Jones, debuted in August.
 
The prose poems and prose sonnets in Dreamlife are packed with postmodern language-leaping, modern irony and absurdity, and a poet’s ageless ear for the pleasures of the lyric and formal experimentation. These are poems that can never quite abandon the hope that life—and language—are worthy pursuits; but neither do they offer up easy assurances about the benefits.
 
Poet and essayist Dan Beachy-Quick writes of Dreamlife of a Philanthropist, “[H]ere, in poems whose wit cannot be told apart from their momentum, we find thinking at work against itself, undoing conclusion, battling intent, in order to recover some lost ground of form’s unconscious foundation.”

Poet and Fence Magazine critic Karla Kelsey writes, “…the voice here charms, leading us into a landscape of Tender Buttons meets Claes Oldenburg or René Magritte."

And Brian Clements, publisher of Firewheel Editions and former editor of Sentence: a Journal of Prose Poetics, offers this praise: "In Janet Kaplan's work, the elements of thought—language, shifting self, recurrence, movement—combine into powerful compounds, compounds into machines whose primary purpose is to give shape and music to the void."

For more information on Janet Kaplan’s Dreamlife of a Philanthropist visit www.undpress.nd.edu/book/P01472 or www.JanetKaplan-litworks.com and for more information on Hofstra’s Department of English visit www.hofstra.edu/English.