Customer Reviews

Alien Candor: Selected Poems, 1970-1995

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For anyone who loves Codrescu's prose, try and tackle his poetry. I have read all of his prose, but find that his poetry is actually the most memorable, and astounding. He has a quickness in his prose, but he is trying to remember to be reader friendly. His poetry moves at the speed of light (or faster, which I know is impossible), and yet balances delicate phrasing, odd tangents, brilliant structure, it is always funny as heck, and finally, deep in a way that some of his shorter prose especially doesn't bother to be. His poetry is like that of a great religious saint for our time -- half-Hermes, and half-Einstein. I love it! He's that bizarre oddity -- a second language poet who is so astonishing in a second language as to be more fluent than most of our very capable poets. Gee whiz, read this book and struggle with it as I have -- you will not feel sad ever again. He is probably the most important living poet in the dada-surrealism lineage, and yet he has crossed over and taken up a kind of Charles Olson-esque study of real places and cities. Dazzling, and unlikely to ever be repeated in this language, Codrescu is our greatest cultural resource, and his poetry is the heart of his heartening project.