Laurie Sheck - Kirkus Review and Biography

Kirkus Review

Celebrated NYC poet Sheck richly reimagines the oft-retold Frankenstein in her defiantly original debut novel, which posits that the fabricated human was Mary Shelley's chance acquaintance, not her creation, and has lived on into the present day.

The "monster" built by overreaching scientist Dr. Victor Frankenstein has been kept alive by his hunger to understand why he was made, how his maker could have abandoned him and the role his unique history plays in the larger scheme of the known universe. In a huge gathering of fragments, somewhat reminiscent of Guy Davenport's eclectic and erudite fictional collages, Sheck fashions  a fascinating dual narrative. Mary Shelley's fictionalized story unfolds in communications from her mother, feminist intellectual Mary Wollstonecraft, to her father, novelist-philosopher William  Godwin; and in Mary's own diary, notes and correspondence—replete  with anguished discussions of her marriage to poet Percy Bysshe Shelley—with such soul mates as her half-sister Fanny and her stepsister Claire Clairmont, Lord Byron's mistress and herself a gifted writer.

The other narrative comprises the autodidact monster's own "notes" on such topics relevant to his own abandoned state as polar exploration, the space-time continuum, robotics and  other re-engineerings of natural states, and the dramatization of conflicts between appearance and reality in China's epic 18th-century novel Dream of the Red Chamber. Initially abstruse and  puzzling, this brilliant fiction gathers both seamless coherence and  immense power as its elements draw together, punctuated by the sentient monster's appeal to his irresponsible maker: "When you first began to make me, didn't you set out on a course you couldn't possibly understand?"

Utterly astonishing and not to be missed.

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Biography

Laurie Sheck was born in the Bronx, New York. She is the author of several collections of poetry, including Captivity(Knopf, 2007), which interacts, in part, with the journals of Gerard Manley Hopkins; Black Series (2001); The Willow Grove (1996), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Io at Night (1990); and Amaranth (1981).

Her poems have been included in two volumes of Best American Poetry and three volumes of The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. She is the editor of the anthology Poem a Day, Volume 2 (Zoland, 2003). She is also the author of the hybrid work A Monster's Notes (Knopf, 2009), which re-examines the un-named monster in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. About Sheck's work, the poet C.K. Williams has said, "Rarely, if ever, has the contemporary lyric been both so pure and so informed with varieties of experience." The poet Rita Dove has said, "Laurie Sheck is a modern shaman...'Listen carefully.' she whispers; and you do, because your life depends on it."

Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New Jersey State Council for the Arts. She has also been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

Laurie Sheck has been a member of the creative writing faculty at Princeton University, and currently teaches in the M.F.A. program at the New School. She lives in New York City.