Susan Briante

On our radar: 'Defacing the Monument' by Susan Briante

Jacket2

During this time of slowed publication, we at J2 want to highlight some books from our (digital) reviews shelf. Today’s title on our radar: Defacing the Monument, by Susan Briante (Noemi Press, 2020). If you’d like to submit a review of this title for consideration, please let us know: jacket2.org/contact

[Text of image above: “From Noemi Press: ‘[Defacing the Monument is] an attempt to bear witness to what happens to those who do not hold the “correct” documents as a way to show texts always bear the marks of power. Part documentary act, part lyric essay, part criticism, Defacing the Monument enacts the possibilities and limits of documentary impulses.’”]

This is not.

Susan Briante

Infographic by Daniel Donner and Stephen Wolf, from How Gerrymandering Can Swing Elections by Stephen Wolf, DailyKos.

April 13, 2018

Defacing the monument

Rukeyser's innovations in docupoetics

Susan Briante

In 1936, just a year after winning the Yale Younger Poet’s Prize, the twenty-two-year-old Muriel Rukeyser arrived in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, the site of one of the worst industrial disasters in United States history, to work on her next poetry project.

April 21, 2014

Recently in Jacket2

Topsy-Turvy

Charles Bernstein

from University of Chicago Press at the end of April
176pp, paper, ebook, and audiobook

••Rain Taxi video launch with Tonya Foster, May 18
••With Chris Funkhauser at Poet Ray'd Yo, WQXC, radio, April 22, 2020 (60 min)
••SemCoop / By the Book video launch with Craig Dworkin, April 29 (YouTube)
•
••Jeremy Sigler, "The Yid and Yang of of Poet Charles Bernstein," Tablet (April 26, 2021)
••Thomas Fink in conversation with Charles Bernstein on Topsy-Turvy at Dichtung Yammer.
••Jefferson Hanson, "Tribute to the Critic of Tone Jam: Remarks Off Bernstein’s Topsy-Turvy," Altered States
••Paul Bove on "Echologs" at Harvard Univ. Press blog

The Bookseller: "Not set out to be a book about the pandemic, this rowdy collection of poems, performances and translations nevertheless speaks volumes about the upside-down world we have all found ourselves living in."

In his most expansive and unruly collection to date, the acclaimed poet Charles Bernstein gathers poems, both tiny and grand, that speak to a world turned upside down. Our time of “covidity,” as Bernstein calls it in one of the book’s most poignantly disarming works, is characterized in equal measure by the turbulence of both the body politic and the individual. Likewise, in Topsy-Turvy, novel and traditional forms jostle against one another: horoscopes, shanties, and elegies rub up against gags, pastorals, and feints; translations, songs, screenplays, and slapstick tangle deftly with commentaries, conundrums, psalms, and prayers.

Biologically speaking (PoemTalk #160)

Edna St. Vincent Millay, 'Love Is Not All' & 'I Shall Forget You Presently'

PoemTalk

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Al Filreis convened Lisa New, Jane Malcolm, and Sophia DuRose to talk about two well-known sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay, “I Shall Forget You Presently” and “Love Is Not All.” “I Shall Forget You Presently” became widely available as one of the four sonnets presented at the end of the book A Few Figs from Thistles (first published in 1920). “Love Is Not All” of 1931 was in Millay’s collection of fifty-two sonnets, Fatal Interview. Both poems were performed by Millay in an undated recording we include on our Millay PennSound page.

May 14, 2021

Rochelle Owens

'Patterns of Animus,' Part Three, 'The Ludwig Skulls'

Jerome Rothenberg

[A continuation from earlier postings on Poems and Poetics of Rochelle Owens’s new masterwork, Patterns of Animus. (J.R.)]

In 1863 Beethoven’s body was exhumed for autopsy, the head

removed and the skull studied for medical research.