Cahiers de Corey

Wednesday, October 13, 2004

Very pleased to report that Bogie's biopsy tests came back negative except for one of the tumors, which was the lowest grade and thus considered to have been cured by excision. And his bone marrow's clean too. We have to keep an eye on him for new developments, but it looks like he will be tugging on his leash and rolling around on the grass for a long time to come. What a relief.

As Aaron has noted, he and I had a conversation over dinner Monday night spurred by the new issue of Fulcrum. I don't have it in front of me (I was reading the Bookery's copy, don't have my own yet) but I was struck by the dialogue there between Chris Stroffolino and Joan Houlihan—struck mostly by the courtesy and evolving mutual regard there. Also I have to admit that I rather like the poems of Houlihan's that appear in that issue. I'm still very wary of her critical stance, her impatience for meaning and closure, and her quickness to invoke eternal verities about poetry and human nature. And I'm still appalled by the vitriolic tone of her column with its numerous ad hominem attacks. Some might defend that style of criticism as refreshing for its honesty, but I think it's destructive, and I don't like to spend time with people who talk that way, in person or on the page. Nonetheless, I have to respect her apparent seriousness about poetry, and most of all her willingness to engage interlocutors like Stroffolino and Steve Burt who challenge her point of view. It would be all to easy to retreat into the fulsome accolades of her fellow conservatives and dismiss the writing that irritates her out of hand.

I might have something more substantive to say about the dialogue itself—particularly the value of "communication" both writers were touting and the attached questions of audience—once I get a chance to read it again more closely.

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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