Cahiers de Corey

Saturday, March 19, 2005

I've been watching that pesky "stick" circle around blogland for a while. Finally it's my turn, thanks to Kevin. Okay then.

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451. Which book do you want to be?

I think some people have been misled by this question: in the novel, this doesn't mean a book to be burned but a book that a resistance member chooses to memorize and thus "become." So I'd probably choose the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass (the later editions are too long).

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Like Kevin, I too have had a thing for Death from the Sandman comics. Beatrice as embodied by Emma Thompson in Much Ado About Nothing. And two Lucas-heroines were crucial to my pubesence: the bikini-clad Leia of Return of the Jedi and the sassy, blue-eyed, probably alcoholic heroine of Raiders of the Lost Arc, Marion Ravenwood aka Karen Allen. Guess I'm too visual a guy to have a crush on purely literary women, unlike the hapless hero of Woody Allen's great short story, "The Kugelmass Episode."

The last book you bought is:

Peter Gizzi's Some Values of Landscape and Weather.

The last book you read is:

Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day.

What are you currently reading?

The twentieth anniversary issue of Verse, James R. Mellow's Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company, Steve Healey's Earthling (I'm reviewing it for Bridge), Steve Benson's Blue Book, Jed Rasula's This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry, and the first edition Dungeon Master's Guide.

Five books you'd take with you to a deserted island:

I'm assuming that a copy of the Bible and a complete edition of Shakespeare are gimmes, here. The other books are chosen for voluminousness (lots of time to kill), rereadability (ditto), and the company they'd provide:

1) John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose.
2) J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings.
3) Complete works of Rilke in German.
3a) a German-English dictionary.
4) James Joyce, Ulysses.
5) Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu.
5a) a French-English dictionary.

Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 people) and why?

This stick dies with me, but y'all should feel free to answer it on your own blogs or webpages or church newsletters or whatever.

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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