Information Desk: An Epic

by Robyn Schiff

Overview

New York Times Book Review Edtitors' Choice

“Among the year's highlights . . . groundbreaking, epic . . . Like visitors exiting the Met’s galleries, readers will emerge from Information Desk bedazzled by the transformative horizons of art.” —Washington Post

“An effluvial rush of memory, desire, data, and metaphor . . . It’s bracing to encounter a mind so voracious, so unapologetic in its intelligence.” —New York Review of Books

A book-length poem set in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, from a writer whose work offers “something few poets ever discover: a vision of the whole world” (Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker)

Robyn Schiff’s fourth collection is an ambitious book-length poem in three parts set at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s information desk, where Schiff long ago held a staff position. Elaborately mapping an interconnected route in and out of the museum through history, material, and memory, Information Desk: An Epic takes us on an anguished soul-quest and ecstatic intellectual query to confront the violent forces that inform the museum’s encyclopedic collection and the spiritual powers of art.

Novelistic in its sweep, frantically informative, and deeply intimate in its private recollections, Information Desk: An Epic wayfares with riveting lyric intensity through an epic array of topics and concerns, including illusion, deception, self-deception, complicity, lechero's coworkers, the composition of pigment, the scattering of seeds, ideas, and capital, and insect infestations spreading within artwork. Along the way, Schiff pauses to invoke three terrifying muses—parasitic wasps—in desperate awe of their powers of precision and generative energy. Information Desk: An Epic undertakes a hemorrhaging ekphrastic journey through artifice and the natural world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780143136804
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/15/2023
Series:	Penguin Poets
Pages:	144
Sales rank:	98,878
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Robyn Schiff is the author of three previous poetry collections, Worth, Revolver, and A Woman of Property, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The recipient of the 2023 Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, she is a Professor at Emory University, and co-edits Canarium Books.

Editorial Reviews

09/18/2023

Schiff (A Woman of Property) revisits her days as an employee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in this breathtaking sweep through personal and public history. A three-part epic subdivided by invocations to the jewel, oak gall, and cuckoo paper wasps, the text considers the beauty of objects made through tortuous and often reprehensible processes. Schiff shifts between the secret harassment to which she was subjected as a staffer at the museum’s information desk and the famous artifacts she saw every day, including Edward Steichen’s photograph of Balzac’s monument, Ingres’s painting of the Princesse de Broglie, and the Egyptian Temple of Dendur, where photographer Nan Goldin stages a protest and employees are treated to a complimentary lunch that “felt like a disembodied wedding... you’re marrying/ someone you’ve never met named/ Money who has no idea how to/ enter you.” The result is not a surreal layering of images but a flowing, insistent stream, wherein “gushing water/ exposes veins of gold” just as Schiff’s “memory rushes/ down the artifice/ thus.” Returning often to a 1995 exhibition that brought real Rembrandts together with imitations and student works, the poet uses the painter’s “darkness painted with a pigment made of/ cooked bone” as a powerful metaphor for the cruelty in art-making. Schiff has composed a fascinating poetic study of the ways that art relates to its audience. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Information Desk:

“A searing yet reverent book-length poem, containing as many jokes as it does social critiques, odes to forgeries and furious passages about goatish colleagues.” —The New York Times

“An encyclopedic poem that captures the immense experience of working, and being, at the Met . . . Information Desk is wide-ranging . . . an effluvial rush of memory, desire, data, and metaphor . . . wryly funny . . . What is consistent across Schiff's books is an interest in the historical vignette and the artifact, their involvement in a web of social and economic relations, all of this expressed through a vocabulary and syntax that match these artifacts in elaboration and craftsmanship. It's bracing to encounter a mind so voracious, so unapologetic in its intelligence and finical grammar.” —New York Review of Books

“Not many books, let alone book-length poems, are as can’t-put-it-down propulsive as Robyn Schiff’s fourth book, Information Desk . . . Readers of all kinds will be overwhelmed by this book’s wonders . . . You’re just going to have to visit Schiff’s museum yourself. You’re going to have such a good time.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

“Among the year's highlights . . . groundbreaking, epic . . . Like visitors exiting the Met’s galleries, readers will emerge from Information Desk bedazzled by the transformative horizons of art.” —Washington Post

“There is quiet humor, alongside a whiff of defiance, in Information Desk’s subtitle: 'An Epic.' An epic poem, of course, calls to mind the Greeks, the Romans, all those illustrious examples—The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, etc. The journey portrayed in Information Desk may initially appear to be more inward, but it’s no less transformative . . . Schiff turns the oft-forgotten worker behind the counter into an opportunity to ask deeper questions about the historical relationship between creativity and economics . . . Who says that the life of the woman behind the counter is not equally adventurous as an epic hero’s?” —Poetry Foundation

“Robyn Schiff’s work has long demonstrated that American poetry can be both ornamental and discursive, both formally inventive and intimate. But the intimacy, in her latest, is woven more explicitly—and even more movingly—into the history and science that have long been the stuff of her métier . . . these are classic Schiff poems: taking from the natural world figures that, in her skilled hands, become devastating metaphors.” —McSweeney's

“Schiff’s epic poem enacts its title, answering questions readers never knew they had . . . Violence and beauty, the banal and the sublime, all coexist in the same, generative space of a poem itself.” —Hyperallergic

“A study of memory as much as of art . . . Schiff orchestrates an engaging drama of consciousness that lures the reader down each page, capturing the mind’s quicksilver leaps from past to present and back again as it pings in Proustian fashion from sensory trigger to anecdote to meditation on history, science, and a panorama of other subjects treated with a mix of vulnerability and wit.” —Poets & Writers

“Schiff’s attention to class and cultural formation [...] is part of a welcome return of class-based discourses to the world of American poetry . . . ranging in intellect, gorgeously slow in its development of thought and feeling . . . [Information Desk] is so faithful to itself, so admirably assured in how it presents us its information.” —Preposition Magazine

“[A] breathtaking sweep through personal and public history . . . Schiff has composed a fascinating poetic study of the ways that art relates to its audience.” —Publishers Weekly

“Ecstatic, propulsive, and novelistic, Robyn Schiff’s Information Desk is a tour-de-force epic on the intricate structures of knowledge, aesthetics, and labor. Astonishingly sibylline with her syllabic constraints, Schiff is one of our most formally brilliant poets writing in American letters today.” —Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings

From the Publisher

This book-length poem delivered by the author is grounded by her experience working at the information desk at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. It sprawls out from there to just about everything that has ever crossed the poet's mind. It includes a great deal of art, of course, and family life, and history, but any attempt to summarize it would be not much shorter than the full text. Schiff's voice is soft and controlled--at times, perhaps too controlled. That is not to say she's not passionate, but she measures out her passion carefully. Note also that the poem is very complex, and those new to poetry might benefit from reading along. D.M.H. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

OCTOBER 2023 - AudioFile