Mlinko, Ange

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Mlinko, Ange

PERSONAL:

Born in Philadelphia, PA; married; children: one son. Education: Attended St. John's College and Brown University.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Brooklyn, NY.

CAREER:

Author. Has taught poetry at Brown University, Naropa University, and Al-Akhawayn University, Ifrane, Morocco.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Book of the Year, Publishers Weekly, 1999, for Matinées; National Poetry Series award, 2004, for Starred Wire.

WRITINGS:

POETRY

Matinées, Zoland Books (Cambridge, MA), 1999.

Starred Wire, Coffee House Press (Minneapolis, MN), 2005.

SIDELIGHTS:

Ange Mlinko is a poet whose verses often center around such subjects as urban life, language and how it succeeds and fails, and ideas and objects both seen and unseen. Some of her works tend toward the avant garde, while her constructions "emphasize exuberance, expansion, speed," noted Stephen Burt in Believer. Her first book of poetry, Matinées, "portrayed her as the product of one place and time: Northeast Corridor America in the late-indie-rock era, with a faux-slapdash, sociable concentration very, very close to Frank O'Hara's," commented Burt. In Starred Wire, her second collection, each poem "has a different natural rhythm, and all leave a vibrant imprint on the senses," reported a Bookwatch critic. "With quick, clever lines that move by rhythm rather than by reasoning," the poems "achieve a surreal and dreamlike atmosphere," stated Library Journal reviewer Diane Scharper.

Her work's "quotient of pure pleasure … means that even readers used to smoother fare ought to delight in her manifold ways," commented a Publishers Weekly contributor. The poetry in Starred Wire "comes out of a decidedly downtown, evasive, antiprose-sense tradition: it's hardly abstract, but it's not often narrative either," Burt noted. Mlinko's "intoxicating, cerebral poems display a unique sense of humor and mystery," observed a reviewer in the New Yorker.