Cahiers de Corey: Happy Birthday, Charles Fourier!

Thursday, April 07, 2005

Happy Birthday, Charles Fourier!

A very exciting message from Spineless Books:

Thursday April 7th, 2005, is the 233rd birthday of Charles Fourier, the French utopian thinker whose alarmingly imaginative vision influenced Marx and Engels, among many others.

Today Spineless Books announces the publication of Fourier Series, by Joshua Corey. Fourier Series is the winner of the Fitzpatrick-O'Dinn Award for Best Book-Length Work of Constrained English Literature, as judged by Christian Bök.

About Fourier Series, Christian Bök writes:

"Joshua Corey writes a poetic series based upon the psychosocial permutations magined by the utopian thinker Charles Fourier. Corey arranges a resonant, emotional lexicon into a quadratic structure that emulates in language the kind of interpersonal relationships that, according to Fourier, might ideally define a social utopia of competitive cooperation. Just as Fourier imagines a set of artfully designed communes, in which members, chosen for their variegated talents, but compatible passions, might coexist in a state of harmonic integrity, so also has Corey selected a diverse ensemble of elegant, sensual phrases and arranged them into an array that highlights the beautiful potential inherent within the force-field of language itself."

Joshua Corey's first book, Selah, was chosen by Robert Pinsky as the winner of the first annual Barrow Street Book Contest and was published by Barrow Street in 2003. His poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and webzines, including LIT, Typo, Colorado Review, Octopus, VOLT, and The American Poetry Review. In 2004 twenty-five sonnets from his new manuscript Severance Songs were selected by Michael Palmer for publication in a special issue of the magazine Conjunctions dedicated to the work of young and emerging poets. In 2005 he was a participant in the Festival of New American Poets sponsored by the Poetry Society of America at New School University in New York City. He lives in Ithaca, New York where he is writing a dissertation on avant-garde pastoral and keeps a weblog, Cahiers de Corey.

http://joshcorey.blogspot.com

Fourier Series will be available April 28th. Postage and handling charges are waived for advance orders.

http://spinelessbooks.com/fourierseries

Spineless Books is an independent publishing house dedicated to the production and distribution, in print and electronic forms, of innovative literature with an emphasis on collaborative writing, formal experimentation, and utopian thought. Our books with spines include Drawn Inward, poems by Mike Maguire, and 2002: A Palindrome Story in 2002 Words by Nick Montfort and William Gillespie, with illustrations by Shelley
Jackson.

Spineless Books Box 2458 Providence RI 02906 http://spinelessbooks.com

While reading email listen to Eclectic Seizure online:
http://spinelessbooks.com/eclecticseizure/2004
http://spinelessbooks.com/eclecticseizure/2005

Hoo-hoo-hooray!

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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