Cahiers de Corey

Tuesday, May 25, 2004

Here's my response to the MoveOn.org Iraq survey:

In most respects I sympathize with those Iraqis who have said in so many words, "Just get out and let us deal with the possibility of civil war." And I am suspicious of our leaders' motivations: decades of U.S. foreign policy show that we are more interested in so-called "stability" in the Middle East (which largely translates to stability of the oil supply) than in democracy. I fear that those Democrats who talk about U.S. troop increases--such as Hillary Clinton and yes, John Kerry--may themselves be more interested in the oil supply's stability (a keystone of American hegemony) than in the safety of our troops--though they are certainly under tremendous stress because of the decisions made by Rumsfeld's Pentagon. At the same time, to simply leave the china shop in a shattered condition strikes me as immoral. I support--and I hope Kerry will support--a plan similar to that outlined in Peter W. Galbraith's article "How to Get Out of Iraq" in the May 13, 2004 issue of THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17103). Establishing a loosely federal government in Iraq (with the support of the United Nations) would enable us to withdraw our troops in the most timely fashion. This seems like the only way to ensure a reasonable amount of self-determination for the Kurds, Sunnis, and Shi'a. Will it transform the Middle East according to the dreams of Wolfowitz and the other neocons? Of course not. But anyone who dreams that the so-called war on terror can be won through military force, through a Westmoreland-esque war of attrition, is not dreaming of peace, or even of victory. It is a dream of perpetual war for war's own sake. We must awaken from it, now.

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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.

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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