Published by the great team at Three Count Pour in Chicago (Ken Taylor, J. Peter Moore) it collects 30 years of work. Highlights include pieces on Michael Palmer, Jorie Graham, Raul Zurita, William Corbett, Norman Finkelstein, Mark Scorggins, Lee Ann Brown, Rachel Blau Du Plessis, Elizabeth Robinson, Peter Gizzi, and Nathaniel Mackey.
“All things/speak if they speak the estranged,” wrote George Oppen. The reviews gathered here represent thirty years of attention to a poetics of estrangement. For the most part I’ve sought to champion the work of poets who operate outside the well-policed boundaries of mainstream critical practice and as such might receive no attention at all. These reviews look mostly at small press poets working on the vital edge of the literary economy, who are committed to an aesthetic of restless and promiscuous invention. Their poetry is oblique, dissonant, and fractured; it both undermines and upholds traditional poetic imperatives, impatient with received notions of form. By and large these poets reject the naïve idea of the poem as a tidy report on subjective experience, focusing instead on the experience of language as such. To write a poetry of estrangement means recognizing that the world is broken and requires a broken kind of language to engage it. It means building small, lyric incursions – little negentropic engines – that create a difficult, disjointed beauty. Poetry is a language inside of language.
"You've marked out a kind of original canon (I'm delighted to be within its precincts) grounded in the world and in language yet sublime and mysterious and, in a way, none of the more mechanical disrupters of language conventions achieve. And of course, your sentences are as 'poetic' as the subjects you examine (reveal, even beyond themselves). A delight and a deep accomplishment."
Michael Heller
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