Exuberance: Poems by Dolores Hayden

May 24, 2019

Koerner Fellow Dolores Hayden, Professor Emerita of Architecture and American Studies, released a book on May 14 entitled Exuberance (Red Hen Press). The poems are set in the earliest years of American aviation when daredevil pilots—woman and men—thrilled spectators who had never seen an airplane.

In a lyrical sequence of persona poems, the pilots in Exuberance wonder how the experience of moving through the air will transform life on the ground. They learn to name the clouds, size up the winds, mix an Aviation Cocktail, perform a strange field landing, and make an emergency jump.

Poet, dramatist, and author Tom Sleigh writes of the author and book, “Intoxicated with the history of aviation, Dolores Hayden has written a work of historical imagination that is vocally energetic, psychologically acute, and musically sophisticated. In their love of physical risk and in their daredevil elan, the speakers in these poems keep faith with the mundane facts of flight as well as its spiritual intimations. The movement between lyrical speech and historical reflection gives us not only a portrait of the early years of the twentieth century, but a book in which technological advance is given a profoundly human voice.”

Professor Hayden is the past president of the Urban History Association and the author of several award-winning books about American landscapes and the politics of the built environment, most recently A Field Guide to Sprawl (Norton, 2004) and Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820–2000 (Pantheon Books, 2003, Vintage, 2004). Her book The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (MIT Press, 1995) explores urban memory in ethnic communities in downtown Los Angeles. Gender and space are the subjects of The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (MIT Press, 1981) and Redesigning the American Dream: Gender, Housing, Work, and Family Life (Norton, 1985; revised and expanded, 2002). A former Guggenheim, Rockefeller, NEH, NEA, and ACLS/Ford fellow, she has taught at MIT, UC Berkeley, and UCLA as well as Yale. In 2006–7 she was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, where in 2009 she co-led “Researching the Built Environment: Spatial Methods and Public Practices.” Professor Hayden is also a widely published poet whose work has appeared in The Yale ReviewSouthwest ReviewThe American Scholar, and The Best American Poetry 2009. In 2012 she was a poetry fellow at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program.