Cahiers de Corey

Monday, November 08, 2004

A spiffy new journal is on sale here at The Bookery: 1913: A Journal of Forms. There's a helpful list of the accomplishments of that year on the inside cover both great and dubious (in the first category we have Edison developing the first talking motion picture; Stein's writing of her portrait "Braque"; and the "Imagiste" issue of Poetry; in the latter category we have the 300-year anniversary celebration of the Romanovs in Russia and the first mass-production line at Ford) that centers its aesthetic proudly within the tradition of Modernism. Fitting therefore that one of the contributors should be Cal Bedient, who has written elsewhere about his desire to recapture the energies of Modernism; he continues that critique in a poem titled "The Red Letter (~ Contemporary Poetry ~)." Other notable contributions come from the usual if highly estimable suspects of pomo lit: Barbara Guest, Cole Swensen, Nathaniel Mackey, Brenda Hillman (a harrowing elegy for the men of the Kursk), Joshua Clover, Steve McCaffery, Jed Rasula. There are also some younger poets, including beautiful baroqueness from my old friend Sarah Gridley (what a pleasant surprise to see her work popping up here! and do keep an eye out for her first book, Weather Eye Open, forthcoming from California), a relatively expansive piece by Graham Foust, a bit of "Closet Zoologies" by Eric Elshtain, and stuff by poets as yet unfamiliar to me: Louis Armand, Steve Willard, Billy Gomberg, Sarah Riggs. Also a very interesting textual art piece by Chris Chen, "no name on the bullet," inspired by the remarkable Alternumerics project by artist Paul Chan over at a site new to me, National Philistine (I see a project on Henry Darger and Charles Fourier there that I'll have to spend some time looking at). So you can tell, I hope, that 1913 is an exciting magazine, if somewhat hard to read (it's wider than it is long and many of the poems require you to turn the book on its side), and I'm glad to make its acquaintance.

I really can't say enough about Sarah's work: if you haven't already, please go read the amazing "Grist" right 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.

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