Reviews of A Table of Content

“At 93, Dorothea Tanning, who has had a long and marvelous life as a visual artist, is our most surprising new poet. She is an audacious dreamer, and the spirit of creativity, the sheer joy of making things, is everywhere apparent in her restless, inventive, energetic and triumphant first book of poems.” —The Washington Post Book World

“Reading these poems, you get the sense that Tanning could pilot her way from here to infinity and not mss a single turn….A Table of Content is the confessional, conversational retrospective of her life. As they say in the art world, it’s well worth checking out.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“This internationally known painter and sculptor’s debut collection is a curious mix of numerous styles: confessionalism, Whitmanic declaration, a self-containment worthy of Merrill. The stance that speaks loudest is a straightforward, unmannered approach to the deconstruction of icons, references and symbols.” —Publishers Weekly

“Like collages, softly surreal, delicately personal, but somehow perfectly right, these works paste together the tangible with what’s not, drawing images from life, family, places, and ideas and showing what was and what could be….There is not a reckless moment in these poems; each word is a deliberate mental stroke, somehow perfectly right.” —Library Journal

"Dorothea Tanning’s verbal wizardry is a constant surprise, an abiding delight, and readers who sit down to A Table of Content can expect to stand up more strangely themselves.” —Minnesota Literature

“Some would call these poems collages, finery glued into dreamy images. But I prefer to call the whole of them a kaleidoscope—angled feelings and dappled ideas constantly shape-shifting into remarkable new patterns, by turns giddy and grave. And when you put the little device down, you realize you’ve all along been looking at your own life, grandly re-imagined by a master. Dorothea Tanning’s verbal wizardry is a constant surprise, an abiding delight, and readers who sit down to A Table of Content can expect to stand up more strangely themselves. She wears her soul on her sleeve, and it shines, it shines!” —J. D. McClatchy

"Dorothea Tanning’s sidewise way of ‘wanting at last to get things/ straight and all of a piece’ glances off the walls and mirrors of a robust and particular intelligence. With a blend of innocent expression and earthly sophistication she sets loose multiple lives, on of which begins after the palanquin breaks down; ones in which everything is awake and speaking to her: the food in the fridge (‘Don’t call it icebox’), inventory in a department store, objects on a table, beloved and lost landscapes. Experienced with disquieting and devastating endings notwithstanding, none of these lives is defeated. Tanning passes from ‘indifferent windows’ to ‘naked bits of think’ and offers her ‘wild entire’: ‘trailing a scarf of history in/ case of weather and nothing to read.’ A Table of Content, a meal not to be late for.” —C.D. Wright