The Horse Fair (Pitt Poetry Series). Cet article n’est pas disponible.The Horse Fair (Pitt Poetry Series)

In The Horse Fair, Robin Becker asks questions about citizenship and participation in the marketplaces—of bodies, of ideas, of objects—in which we function. She investigates how individuals marginalized by gender, religion, and sexual preference negotiate public and private spheres while inventing sustainable communities. Beginning with the great nineteenth-century French painter Rosa Bonheur, Becker has produced a number of multi-voiced, synthetic portraits, each within a framework of social history and a poetics of partiality—she speaks from the persona of Charlotte Salomon, child of assimilate, German-Jewish parents and grandparents and killed by the Nazis at the age of twenty-six; she appropriates passages from the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services; and juxtaposes them against stanzas that mourn her sister’s death and those that celebrate non-traditional families. Organized around the long meditations, other poems show Becker's dexterity with formal verse (sestina, sonnet, tercets) and her imaginative engagements with free verse.

The Horse Fair takes its name from Bonheur's monumental painting and serves as the vehicle through which Becker explores anti-Semitism, cross-dressing, and Bonheur's lifelong relationships with women. In Becker's hands, The Horse Fair transports us to the communal plaza where we come to barter and to buy, to study one another, to touch the foundation upon which we build our temporary habitations.

Robin Becker is professor of English and women’s studies at The Pennsylvania State University, is the author of six collections of poetry, including The Horse Fair, All-American Girl, and Giacometti’s Dog. In 2002, the Frick Art and Historical Center in Pittsburgh published Venetian Blue, a limited-edition chapbook of Becker’s art poems. Becker is the recipient of individual fellowships from the Bunting Institute, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2000, she won the George W. Atherton III Award for Excellence in Teaching from Penn State.