Update on the Descent

Ellen Hinsey

Ellen Hinsey’s new collection Update on the Descent is a powerful meditation on violence, war, and human division. Drawing on personal experience and research at an international tribunal, Hinsey explores the nature and impact of terror and tyranny for both the United States and Europe. Dynamically and innovatively written in lyrical and anti-lyrical forms, including prose, aphorisms, and philosophical notebooks, Update on the Descent is a masterwork, an exploration of the extremes of the human condition, tackling issues of civil strife as well as reconciliation and the renewal of the spirit.

ELLEN HINSEY’s other collections of poetry include Cities of Memory, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition, and The White Fire of Time. Update on the Descent was a 2007 National Poetry Series Finalist. Her other honors include a Berlin Prize Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, and a Lannan Foundation Award. Her poems, essays, and translations have appeared widely in such publications as the New York Times, the New Yorker, Poetry, the Southern Review, and the Irish Times. She lives and teaches in Paris.

“In this meditation on the vita activa, Hinsey journeys poetically and philosophically through the ruins of what it means to be human in the twenty-first century. Human nature is this lyric art’s first-person, and its utterance is protean. Throughout we hear the cris de coeur of our time, from a scaffold of collective memory artfully constructed by one of our most compelling poets. Hinsey’s sense of line, cadence, and tonality is remarkable, and she deserves a serious and attentive readership in this country.” — Carolyn Forché

“With this book, Ellen Hinsey confirms her status as one of the most profound and intense poets of her generation. Update on the Descent is arranged in an extremely sophisticated pattern, alternating Dantean visions, contemporary accounts of torture, and thoughts on our human condition which crystallize into formulae possessing all the depth and darkness of Heraclitus. It has the touch of strangeness indispensable for any great poetry, but its moral message is straightforward and full of inner force.” — Tomas Venclova, author of Winter Dialogue and The Junction: Selected Poems

“Ellen Hinsey has manifested a range of concern and a sensitivity to larger human issues which is the sine qua non of authentic poetry. She has found a way to be both truthful and original, to make poems which are absorbing and enlightening, historically pertinent and philosophically urgent. . . . To our great good fortune they succeed in their unlikely ambitions.” — C. K. Williams