Cahiers de Corey

Tuesday, August 10, 2004

Make that cheese ravioli. As I was saying, Furst's book is a gripping good read, perhaps even on the same level as Patrick O'Brian for its combination of acute observation of human behavior and depth of historical detail (with a focus on espionage instead of O'Brian's focus on seamanship). It's certainly of higher quality in the craft department than a lot of contemporary non-genre fiction, and it may even have more to tell us about "great themes" (war, greed, betrayal, love, etc.). But it's basically what Graham Greene called an "entertainment." It's le plaisir du texte, not jouissance. I'm not sure it offers me a model for narrative; it's not likely I'd ever attempt that sort of writing myself (even if I were willing to do the enormous labor of research involved). Probably what confines it most definitively to "entertainment" status is that it's a historical novel: it's not about today and doesn't grapple with our present moment except in indirect ways. Its style is inherited as far as I can tell from masters like Conrad and Le Carre; it's certainly not modernist. And I can't figure out the politics just yet; the book is clear-eyed about the monstrous inhumanities wrought by both tribalism and inflexible state systems but I don't know its view of capitalism or liberal democracy yet. I'm learning things about the 1930s, the Balkans, the Soviet Union, the Spanish Civil War. It's an extremely worthwhile read. But it doesn't lead me anywhere as a writer, I don't think. It's a cul-de-sac. I would never want to imitate it.

The other wondering will have to wait for a time when I'm less fatigued; but I want to puzzle some over what Steve Evans says about the banalization of good writing in the latest issue of The Poker.

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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