Turner Publishing is proud to present a new edition of Sandra Hochman's first novel, Walking Papers
First published by Viking Press in 1971, Hochman's widely-praised novel is about a messy divorce told with a poet's verve.
From the Viking Press edition: Diana Balooka: "Out of my womanhood is my madness woven." And, for Diana, out of marriage has divorce arisen. With four children, a pet Zulu-Terrier (a rare breed), and a wheeler-dealer love affair to boot.
Diana Balooka: "We are babies. Watched by our elders. Like the dangerously Insane and deaf we invent our own language We gesture in our own mudras. We understand each other." Breaking into herself, Diana is a sanity robber armed with cupfuls of tears and lots of laughs. How can pain be amusing?
Sandra Hochman's novel is how.
This is a madcap erotic journal of the very separate parts of one woman's life. It is played out with a great personal intensity, a kind of tape-recorded reality that stuns and amazes upon the sound of her own voice; fast forward to Juarez. Mexico; reverse to her flamboyant grandfather's used stageprop farm, or to life In Paris with a hypnotist; hold, for a moment of tormented reflection, on Jason, the nonhusband; then slowly spin forward again, frantic and funny, turn, turn, to everything there is a season . . . . Should the tape chance to break. she bends and splices it together, twists it and sets it to reel on a little further.
Miss Hochman pulls and tugs her heroine-a mother, tapdancer. writer, and partner in an affair that stretches from an ocean beach to real estate on Seventy- second Street-as she is caught to a bizarre parade of men on the hunt in New York City. Her invention, sensuality, and poetic gifts lend to Walking Papers a totally original novelist's voice belonging, in Diana's words, to "a woman obsessed with essentials." A women to be read.
About the Author :
The author of six novels with three forthcoming from Turner Publishing, Sandra Hochman is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated poet with six volumes of poetry. She also authored two nonfiction books and directed a 1973 documentary, Year of the Woman, currently enjoying a renaissance. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, and she was a columnist for Harpers Bazaar. She also ran her own foundation, "You're an Artist Too" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to teach poetry and song writing to children ages 7–12 for fifteen years.
Review :
"Poet Sandra Hochman’s first novel coruscates with erotic wit, inventiveness, insight, finely tuned language—and a lot of pain. Much of her earlier poetry explores the short-circuited communication between the sexes, and here she expands that theme. Her heroine tries feverishly to come to terms with a society where hangups abound and female dependence seems genetically fixed. Diana’s efforts to communicate escape her lips like shrieks of desperation. ‘Out of my womanhood is my madness woven,’ Diana cries. Such fictional laments, in their way, dig deeper than all the work of the Kate Milletts and the Germaine Greers.”—Arthur Cooper, Newsweek
“Walking Papers is a first-rate novel, a kind of concentrated, eroticized Herzog, the wife’s side of divorce madness. The book is distinguished by its truthfulness and inventiveness. Each of the twenty-odd brief chapters spins off on its own eccentric, comic course, and yet the realities of marital disaster are never rendered incredible by the writer’s anguished playfulness. So sharp is Miss Hochman’s depiction of sexual bewilderment, so dense are these compressed scenes with ironic outrage and perplexed emotion, that I began to think of the heroine as a prisoner escaped from Kafka’s Penal Colony, whose divorce writ had been tattooed into her skin.”—Philip Roth
"I though Sandra Hochman's Walking Papers terribly funny."—John Cheever
"She is the most important woman poet of the English language."—Pablo Neruda
"Sandra Hochman is the American Akhmatova. Her poetry will remain as long as people read English."—Robert Lowell
"I know of no other poet other than Sylvia Plath who is able to capture the pain of being a woman in the beauty of her poetry."—Anne Sexton
"A kind of urban-pastoral innocence... a sensible harsh wit— an uncommon plainness, a willingness to take risks, a power to invest the ordinary with the strange, an amused (and amusing) control of the delicate forces of diction and rhythm."—Dudley Fitts (in his introduction to the Yale Younger Poets Award-winning book Manhattan Pastures)"She has the essential craziness of the real poet which makes her work very exciting indeed."—James Dickey, New York Times Book Review
"Gold filigree, flower-bursts, sunlight on dew, claps of joy, and faint intimation ever-present of the shadows of ghosts give an air of a superbly sensuous intensity to all she writes."—Norman Mailer
"At eighty-one I still look forward to reading any day the poetry of Sandra Hochman. Her new book is a cause to celebrate. She is not only my favorite poet because she has fire and guts but she is able to capture in her blood and her vision what the words 'women’s revolution' really mean. When people look back at this time they will turn to the words of Sandra Hochman. Her poetry should be read by every woman alive, and every man alive too, especially men who want to know how women feel. She not only reflects on women’s empowerment— she meditates on stopping the pain and kicking ass to gain control of your life. Like Sylvia Plath and Maya Angelou, she knows how to make you cry and like the great comedians, she knows how to make you laugh. Is it any wonder I think every woman young and old should keep the poetry of Sandra Hochman by their bedside?"—Flow Kennedy
"The patter may be what you'll remember best and it's certainly what you'll enjoy the most—it won't make the book any more important than it isn't but it does have the clear sparkle of chipped ice."—Kirkus
