Cahiers de Corey

Monday, July 11, 2005

Many poems of distinction in the new issue of CROWD by friends (Brian Teare!) and blogger-friends (Catfu!) and innumerable poets whose work I like: Eric Baus, William Fuller, Forrest Gander, Barbara Guest, Brenda Hillman, Katy Lederer, Chelsey Minnis, Karen Volkman, Elizabeth Willis. Catherine's poem is from her Tonight's the Night manuscript and it has one of the most beautiful last lines in recent memory: "flaking off toward the mouth of the flue." Brian's poem "The Word from His Mouth, It Is Perfet," is erotic and baroque and very Catholic. You could say something very similar about Forrest Gander's series "Present Tense" but add natural history to the mix. Unutterably sexy or sexy unutterables: "In English there is no word for the dip of your waist." Chelsey Minnis' poem is one of the remarkable "Prefaces" that I heard her read at the PSA Festival last spring: "The poet I worship is Edward Dorn, because I adore his disgust..." Salutary revulsion! There's some good black-and-white art, too, including a very cool comic about pigeon-breeding in Bushwick by Sara Varon; photos of sculptures that look like exploded stolen shopping carts and milk crates by Jane South; and some witty ink drawings by Raymond Pettibon. I like the use of art pages to break up the poems (there's prose too). I feel that CROWD strikes a middle ground between the established semi-avant mags and the magazines of "the few poets undescribed and therefore undestroyed" (a distinction being drawn at the revived blog of Tony Tost—welcome back, Tony, and congrats on getting hitched!). It has all the apparatus of an establishment mag (author names on the back cover, author bios, ads in the back), however. I've come to prefer the stripped-down, intimate feel of magazines like The Tiny and Carve; but something glossier that carries a whiff of the marketplace arguably has more appeal for casual readers who might be put off by the smaller mags' coterie aura. What really counts for me is the vigor and idiosyncracy of a journal's editorial vision. I tend to read magazines that lack the stamp of personality with much less care and interest, even when they contain good work.

Our friends Bonnie & Terry have invited us out onto Cayuga Lake on their boat this fine summer evening. Looking forward to it.

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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