Wendy will be reading with English Poet Laureate Andrew Motion at The 92nd Street Y in New York on Monday, April 7, 2008.
(See Appearances for details and for more upcoming readings.)
Click here to order a copy of Listen from Amazon.com.
You can also help us increase sales of the book by taking a
moment to rank the book on Amazon's site.
More praise for Listen:
"...honed to a keenness that cuts to the bone..."
—The East Hampton Star
"...a voice that is cool and luminous as moonlight..."
—The Boston Globe
"Wendy Salinger's Listen reminded me of The Hours by
Michael Cunningham. The writing is perfectly beautiful:
strip-mined jewels of language. Knowing her people is
cumulative and extraordinary. I wept and I loved. Listen is a
great book of great distinction." — Pat Conroy
"An absolutely beautiful, important and stunning piece of work.
It wil mean so much to so many people, not just because of its story,
but because of the incredible texture of the language. So few books
come out that are as aware as this one that words are the medium
that we're breathing when we read." — Andrew Sean Greer, author of The Confessions of Max Tivoli
"Set to the rhythm of dreams, Wendy Salinger's Listen is an
intensely lyrical, often shocking song of heartache laced with irony
and wit—the poet's look at the poet's soul. An astounding
accomplishment." — Josephine Humphreys, author of Nowhere Else
on Earth and Rich in Love
"With subtle ferocity and haunting originality of prose, Wendy
Salinger proves to be Sylvia Plath's true heir, and Listen a mighty
sequel to The Bell Jar." — Roya Hakakian, author of Journey From
the Land of No
I write down everything, I think I've exhausted everything, if I get it all out, if I just tell everything,
but the dreams keep coming, the talk goes on, Mother, your words, my words, his, unspooling from my head,
my tongue, my fingers, coming off the landscape even, growing like kudzu, fattening on rusted farm machinery
and abandoned cars, tobacco sheds, covering them over till you can only guess the names of things by their shape
Mother, what if I open my mouth someday and that's what comes out? What if suddenly I can only speak in the hideous language of metaphor?
Listen is a memoir of voices, the voices of parents that linger in the ears of children until the day when those children are able to sound
their own note. A domineering father and a professor of languages and literature in the 1950s and '60s, Victor has four women trapped in
his orbit — his long-suffering wife and his three well-behaved daughters. "Teacher, poet, translator" is how he wants his gravestone
to read, and in life he is dedicated to passing on to his family the great cultural achievements of Western civilization — poetry,
philosophy, religion, music, art. But he leaves darker gifts as well, in particular, to his daughter Wendy, the most traumatic legacy of all: incest.
A major achievement and a stunning debut, Listen is about how families shape their memories and how even things that are never spoken about
have potent echoes. It's also a memoir that chronicles a poet's apprenticeship to words, the story of a daughter who listened and who,
with the gift for poetry her father gave her, learned to translate the darkest secrets of their past.
Wendy Salinger is the author of Folly River, which won the National Poetry Series, and a graduate of
Duke and the University of Iowa. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Kenyon Review, the Paris
Review, and Ploughshares.
Anger and invective make dramatic reading, and poet Salinger's haunting
memoir captures vividly the way her father's accusing, complaining, raging
tirades against his wife filled their family life in the 1950s and '60s: at
the dinner table ("we were so full of your voice we could barely swallow");
in the car ("Choke and throttle. Fumes, fuming"). But slowly the daughter
reveals secrets she can still barely confront: Her domineering father,
eminent professor and poet, sexually abused her. The detailed section on his
dying goes on much too long. But the spare narrative is a stirring
coming-of-age story, occasionally in verse, mostly in lyrical prose, with no
closure. The biggest surprise is the submissive mother's story, revealed
when he is in the hospital and there is space. It turns out that she is far
more sophisticated than her family—and the reader—realized. But why did she
do nothing? She knew. Her denial—"once you say something out loud, you can't
put it back"—is the unforgettable climax.
—Hazel Rochman
Publishers Weekly
April 2006 (Reviewed Jan. 23, 2006)
His epitaph reads "TEACHER, POET, TRANSLATOR." Salinger, in this memoir
of her father (whom she refers to as Victor), leaves a full portrait of
the man in the shadows from which she gleans a two-part personal and
family history ("Life Before Death"; "Life After Death"). With creative
control and telling imagery, poet Salinger (Folly River) renders the
everyday absorbing. Shifting voice, recreated internal and external
dialogue, suggestion, nuance and detail draw readers voyeuristically
into the marriages, births, school days, hospital stays, aging,
ailments and deaths of Salinger's family headed by an abusive,
self-centered, self-indulgent artist father. "All families," according
to the voice Salinger gives her mother, "have their secrets." Although
political items (civil rights sit-ins, fallout shelters) set the
historical context, Salinger, particularly in the second section, veils
the personal through stream-of-consciousness monologue and allusive
private poems. Eulogy and indictment remain unresolved. Salinger has
two burdens: to honor her father ("The hand that guided me. That put
the pen in my hand") and to struggle through the recovered memory of
his sexual abuse ("Way back. Way far away. A long, long time ago, he
put his hand there"). In this tender and tough remembering, Victor's
line "He who understands all forgives all" may enlighten but not
assuage.
The East Hampton Star
"Listen is as much about itself as it is about the author's life. That is,
it's about language...overflowing with the clamoring, insistent, pungent,
sometimes spare but often lushly poetic words of this arresting book.... The
household she describes is the most hair-raisingly dysfunctional family since the
Oedipuses.... The default conversation between husband and wife is the peculiar
kind of infighting that every marriage develops, but here honed to a keenness
that cuts to the bone."
—Richard Horwich
The Washington Post Book World
"The title of Listen is both an admonition and a plea; it's also a clue to
how to read this impressionistic book. Wendy Salinger, a National Poetry
Series winner, is an ornate stylist, but she also recognizes that words make up
only part of any text. Here, she navigates the negative spaces between words and
charts the distances between what is said and what we actually hear. Listening
is 'a form of power really,' she reminds us, and her memoir is first and
foremost a disturbing story of power relations.... Some books are called
'difficult' because they use big words and complex sentences, others because they
invent new syntactical rules and sometimes break even those. There's another kind
of difficult book, though, one that details hideous interpersonal
transgressions, such as incest. Listen includes all of these things, and in doing so
reclaims for Salinger the power and authority her father denied her."
—Andrew Ervin
The Boston Globe
"Wendy Salinger recaptures her growing-up years with such lyricism and
quizzical intelligence (she is, after all, a prize-winning poet) that she might be
writing about a blessed childhood....Sylvia Plath comes, inevitably, to mind.
Salinger, though, more solitary, deeply conflicted, writes not in the heat of
fury but in a voice that is cool and luminous as moonlight, redolent of
heartache yet also of survival, the latter a choice she has made. No pain, no
poetry."
—Amanda Heller
Wendy will be reading in Sag Harbor on Saturday, August 19.
(See Appearances for details and for more upcoming readings.)
Listen is currently featured on BookMovement.com, where
Wendy will be taking reader's questions via email. Check it out.
Click here to order a copy of Listen from Amazon.com.
You can also help us increase sales of the book by taking a
moment to rank the book on Amazon's site.
More praise for Listen:
"...honed to a keenness that cuts to the bone..."
—The East Hampton Star
"...a voice that is cool and luminous as moonlight..."
—The Boston Globe
To find out about upcoming readings, lectures and new works
by Wendy Salinger, please add your name to Wendy's mailing list by sending an email to wendy@wendysalinger.com.
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All information will be kept entirely confidential and used only
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