Cahiers de Corey

Wednesday, September 29, 2004

It's always fun to get a new batch of books at the Bookery. Today the standouts are Louise Matthias' Lark Apprentice, which has a blurb from good buddy Richard Greenfield, and some Pressed Wafer chapbooks: City Point by Jim Behrle, August Letter to My Wife and Daughters by Joseph Torra, backandforth by William Corbett, In Residence by Beth Anderson, The World of Difference by Seido Ronci, and Cinema Yosemite by Del Ray Cross. I wish we had room to display all of these; maybe I can work something out. Happy too to see some re-orders of books that were purchased: Marcella Durand's Western Capital Rhapsodies, Geoffrey Dyer's The Dirty Halo of Everything, Renee Gladman's The Activist (a personal favorite), and the beautiful Rumor edition of Lorine Niedecker's New Goose.

Reading "A" in earnest now. The sonnets of "A-9" are so intricate and beautiful, even as they make me feel like I have to master both Spinoza's Ethics and the first chapter of Capital to truly sound their depths. I seem to have set myself up to read most of the big longpoems (where did that locution come from? Why "longpoem" and not "long poem"? What's the provenance of that?). But it's impossible to do justice to The Cantos or "A" in a single chapter; I'll have to be very selective, without being so selective that it looks like I'm disregarding whatever's not convenient to my argument. I'm not going to master these poems in the time I have (or a lifetime, for that matter), nor—and I hate to admit it—am I particularly interested in straight scholarship, crucial as it is. I'm looking to generate useful ideas from/for reading. I think generation, in all its notations, is the only real defense any of these textual monoliths can offer for themselves beyond their aesthetic appeal (which is considerable). For now at least, I'll leave it to others to do the glossing.

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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