The Real World by Emma Winsor Wood

Emma Winsor Wood’s The Real World takes us on a trip through our media-saturated world of wastes and wonders. It has all the immersive, propulsive power of the reality shows I binge-watch and of any book by Chelsey Minnis. And yet Winsor Wood’s collection lives its most astonishing life at the level of the line. In the words of Emily Dickinson, it hits “a World, at every plunge.” At one moment, “The sky is a very nosy librarian.” And at the next, “Feelings are solid-gold toilet seats.” By her attentiveness to each impression of the bombarded mind, Wood offers us a world that is constantly made new, that is only familiar because it is real.

—Amanda Auerbach

Presently, we find ourselves in a frantic cinema of climates and hasty accommodations, of what Wallace Stevens once described as “chaos in motion and not in motion.” And necessary to our survival, it would seem, is a frantic commerce between miracle and kitsch. In The Real World, Emma Winsor Wood shows herself to be the true cineaste of this commerce. The poems here are scripted to menace and tenderness, design and desire. As unimaginable as the future is, I believe that Wood has imagined it. This is visionary writing.

—Donald Revell

Anyone who in recent years has been paying attention to what’s going on in the public sphere, the media, and even in one’s private life will perceive in the title of Emma Winsor Wood’s brilliant book The Real World a curl of irony. That is certainly present—and for good reason. The main instrument at work in what one might call the perpetual modernization of the cultural environment is reality production, the generation of commodities and simulacra and the fostering of a taste, and even a desire, for them. Emma Winsor Wood has made herself literate in the vernacular of this “real world,” watching its ongoing commodity melodramas, witnessing the dramatic unwinding and rewinding of streamed realities. And she has done so while conducting a wry and surprisingly happy flirtation with cynicism. That happiness is fostered by Wood’s sense of the absurd as in many ways glorious, as for example in the magnificent final work in the book, “Westworld,” a foray into a landscape of triumphant pathos and ridiculous sublimity. The hilarity may be worth the trip. Most of us don’t know how to deal with the reality of the unrealities in which we find ourselves living. Wood shows us one way to do so—and it’s a great one, one in which we can be real.

— Lyn Hejinian

Emma Winsor Wood’s The Real World is an invitation to a schizophrenic internal monologue. It is the distilled opus of late-stage capitalism. Through this remarkable collection, the speaker, “a glamorous yet impertinent heroine,” plays out the collapsing logic of commercial television. And, like any great program, the result is hypnotic.

—Kyle McCord

Emma Winsor Wood’s The Real World skids along the surfaces of pop culture, shredding its slick packaging of human experience, repurposing those fragments to reveal the vast abyss we’ve been perched on all this time. Inventive and startling, these poems are part cultural critique, part existential horror, as entertaining as the entertainment they skewer. This book asks again and again what is real, and its answers spin in delightfully funny, maddening circles: “In simple terms / I am an escapist illusion on a branch.”

— Melissa Ginsburg

The Real World is a book of poems for the startled mind, drenched by rushes of image (life) and searing against the insides of our screenburnt eyelids. Emma Winsor Wood reminds us that commercials are meat, our songs algorithmic, and yet inside the refracting hallucinatory spectre: we still, she thinks, can live.

—Kelly Schirmann

Much like Marshall McLuhan’s maxim, “the medium is the message,” The Real World is an experimental realization that examines the endlessly-shifting relationship to the self through a video-camera lens. The traumatic is described with calmness, excitement is cast in dazzling dislocations. The telecast is a mirror, the medium as important as the content: “The trees make leaves. / The persons buy lives on e-Bay.” Through Emma Winsor Wood’s playful-yet-poignant poetic and imaginative declarations, the bizarre and mundane meet in successions of intriguing premonitions, with the projection of tragedies as imagined by a nation of television addicts.

—Geoffrey Gatza

Originally from New York City, Emma Winsor Wood has a BA in Russian History & Literature from Harvard and an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the editor of Stone Soup Magazine, which publishes writing and art by children 13 and under; she also edits their growing list of books by young authors.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 108 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-388-1

$16

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