Cahiers de Corey

Wednesday, February 26, 2003

Jim Behrle, that good, good man, will be publishing some of my poems at his formidable exercise in Internet magazinehood can we have our ball back?. They will be in issue number 17 and for the people, as always.

Just came home from Ithaca's favorite grad student hangout, a bar called the Chapter House. I hardly ever go there any more, but I went up to campus around 4 to hear William Spanos give a talk on Heidegger and Foucault and then fell in with the professor and a couple of classmates with whom I took a course on femininity, aesthetics, and psychoanalysis last semester. After the wine-and-sushi reception (the Ivy Leage is not without its perks) we headed down to the Chapter House and the next time I looked at a clock it was 10 PM. It was only this past Saturday that Emily and I joined a group of poets at Maxie's for another festival of conversation and beer. My clothes smell like smoke; it's feeling like old times here in Ithaca—I thought I'd left the drinking life behind when I got out of the MFA program. But of course tomorrow I'll be in Baltimore with a bunch of other friends with MFAs and no doubt we'll be boozing it up again there, too. Like Nick Piombino (whose Theoretical Objects we'll be reading in the poetics class in two weeks) I'm a fan of Bass Ale. Maybe if we mention it often enough they'll offer our blogs corporate sponsorship. It would be nice to at least choose the content for the banner ad struggling for your attention at the top of this page.

Thought I would post something angsty about careerism and the motiveless mediocrity that is the AWP, but I'm too tired and happy. But I do plan to bring you some kind of update after I've landed in Charm City, so stay tuned.

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“Joshua Corey has reinvented the good old-fashioned American avant-garde epic poem (Whitman, Stein, Crane, O’Hara) and thrust it, kicking if not screaming, into the early 21st century, ‘rescued / by what survives the will to survive.’ The result is thrilling, and unlike any poetry I know.”

—John Ashbery

"Joshua Corey’s The Barons is a sprawling collection of poems intent on toeing the line between the profound and the glib, brainy deconstruction and guttural implosion. These poems are like toys cranked up to the point of breaking or like hurricanes whipped into speed and spinning furiously in place."

—Joe Hall, Colorado Review

Available from Omnidawn Publishing and wherever books are sold.

Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy is a darkly glamorous existential noir in the late modernist tradition of José Saramago, W.G. Sebald, Italo Calvino, and Roberto Bolaño. Written in gorgeous and elliptical prose, this electric first novel is a love story, a ghost story, and a psychological thriller about the enigma of American innocence, the fatality of storytelling, and the precarious destiny of reading itself.

"Corey’s prose registers the sensations, perceptions, and experiences of the novel’s characters — primarily the protagonist — in truly the only way such characters actually come to life: they live in language, and to that end the writing in Beautiful Soul, in its scrupulous attention to phrase and image in almost every sentence, could be called an attempt to bring the characters and their milieu to life through the vigor of the words on the page."

--Daniel Green, Full Stop

"We hold a letter, its creases worn nearly through from years of opening and folding shut again. Yet each reading is a revelation, a shock, a mystery, a challenge. Corey gives this a new jolt, a new charge, in this rich and intensely self-reflective novel."

--Spencer Dew, decomP

Available from Amazon in print or Kindle editions, from Small Press Distribution, and from the publisher, Spuyten Duyvil Press.

One of the Academy of American Poets' Notable Books for 2011.

"Joshua Corey's book of sonnets is formally playful and emotionally raw, with an intensity of expression that is at times harrowing. . . . [A]n extraordinary volume." —Paul Hoover

"These songs shuttle between a past and a future, cast adrift or severed from a violent, ashen present into a necessary untimeliness. . . . What then of the sonnet, repository of desire and enemy of time? It is, as ever, that form by which we re-imagine subjectivity to confront altered circumstances, and to assess 'the shipwreck of the singular' in the maelstrom of the many. . . ." —Michael Palmer

"In Severance Songs, Joshua Corey tends to the always-mysterious border that connects the interior and the exterior. Is one inside the tale if one alludes to it? Is the eye tethered as witness to what it sees? And who can avoid singing these 'culpability cantos'? Yet if the lush Eden of intimacy foresees our later expulsion, this poet shows us how to stand at the garden's threshold where 'reaching builds on reaching.' Corey risks the possible emptiness inherent in rupture to seek out the ways we are 'knotted to one another's possibilities.' The architecture of the poem, he reveals, is replete with doors and windows and it is for us to discover whether we are looking in or looking out." —Elizabeth Robinson

Now available from Small Press Distribution, Amazon, or your local bookstore.

Read reviews at Publishers Weekly, Wave Composition, The Critical Flame, TrainBust, Poetry Northwest, and in Spoon River Poetry Review.

Goodreads

Joshua's bookshelf: currently-reading

Swann's Way

by Marcel Proust

Slowly, slowly sinking into the astonishingly sensual memory-world of Proust. At forty, I think I'm finally old enough to appreciate it. Reading the Moncrief but I'd like to check out the Lydia Davis translation as well.

tagged: currently-reading