Cahiers de Corey

Sunday, April 23, 2006

Happy as a pig in you-know-what with the journals that have come in this weekend: the Lisa Robertson issue of Chicago Review (which includes among other goodies an essay by Cal Bedient, "The Predicament of Modern Poetry (The Lyric at the Pinch-Gate)" that I'd like to see become part of a larger conversation) and the premier issue of PRACTICE: NEW WRITING + ART, which is both a beautiful object and shrewdly edited—a lot of the work featured there straddles that line between my two favorite modes, the postmodern baroque and social formalism. On the one hand there's the poems from Christi Kramer's sequence titled Reading 'The Throne' that purports to be "an ethnography-in-poetry of Iraqi Kurds exiled and living as refugees in Harrisonburg, Virginia"; an interview with and two poems by the Bosnian poet Semezdin Mehmedinovic, who advocates a strongly "documentary dimension to [his] work, which hopefully brings us closer to the truth"; and an essay by Betsy Andrews called "A Huge and Important Thing: The Body P\oet/olitic." On the other hand, there's a poem from soon-to-be-SOON reader Dan Beachy-Quick that he says is "the result of a fusion of Plato's Phaedrus and the event to come" (the "event" being the birth of his first child); a collaboration between G.C. Waldrep & John Cross that ranges gorgeous words and phrases in ragged columns down the page; and some acutely synesthetic poems by Eleanor Graves: "Sweet flowers sweat bitterly in the mouth." In the comments box of my last post, "Spicergirl" complains that I didn't really answer "Snapshots'" question about how theoretical poetry might be made available to the common reader: I might now direct both of them toward PRACTICE, because most of the poems are preceded by one-page statements about the work that are designed to make it more accessible.

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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