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College of Liberal Arts and Sciences University of Florida

2024 Newsletter

Newsletter Archive(2001–2024)
Department of English E-Newsletter

News of Faculty

November

Ange Mlinko sits on a couch decorated in winged leopards. Behind her is walls of bookshelves. She is gesturing with her hand as though pictured mid-speech.

Professor Ange Mlinko read from her new monograph, Difficult Ornaments: Florida and the Poets (Oxford) at Gainesville community bookstore, The Lynx Books. As mentioned on the Oxford UP website, Difficult Ornaments is about the works that six twentieth-century American poets created in and about the state of Florida–or, in one case, refused to create–that contribute to a psychogeography: a Florida that one can access from anywhere in the world through the pages of their books. The word “ornament” is used by both biologists and literary critics to describe the extras of beauty; but whether it is the encumbrance of a peacock’s tail or the profusion of metaphor, ornaments are also seen as “difficult.” Mlinko’s book explores what it is about “difficult ornaments” that make poems surprising, distinctive, and enduring, as well as whether a proximity to the tropics–nature’s own laboratory–compels poets to reach for invention and experiment.