American Fractal (Paperback)

~ Timothy Green (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

The poems in Timothy Green’s American Fractal find love within love; landscape within landscape; the ‘I’ and ‘you’ nestled within the bigger ‘I’ and ‘you.’ Unpredictable, uproarious, and true to the wonder of the moment, Green’s poems are chockfull of magical imagery that blurs the waking and dream life.

—Denise Duhamel, author of Queen for a Day and Kinky

Timothy Green’s American Fractal is a remarkable study in the refraction of language. As with memory, language bends and shapes itself, defining and redefining images like opposing mirrors, reflecting an infinite succession of epiphanies. The effect is evocative, energized and sure-footed, full of nuance and thematic dexterity, as in his exquisite poem ‘Hiking Alone’ where insights like glimmerings in a ‘box of moonlight,’ are made translucent by the kind god of this fine poet’s imagination. This book has the gift of passion. It has fire at its core.

—James Ragan, author of The Hunger Wall and Lusions

In Timothy Green’s appropriately titled American Fractal a whole vision is created from fragments of American myths, family, religion, the body, holidays, money, food, art, lovers, science, ads, and even earthquakes. His poems are wonderfully original and American in their irony—it’s a kind-hearted irony with truth as its goal. With his subjects ‘...each image one moment / behind the last catching up and catching up.’ Startling and alive, these are self-aware poems that break apart and then come back together. Green writes, ‘One thing is always / mistaken for / another, as if accident were / the fundamental attribute of life.’ Green’s poems build with language, imagery, and a sweet cleverness into surprising commentaries and imaginative revelations. This is an outstanding first book.

—Laurie Blauner, author of All This Could Be Yours and Facing the Facts

Product Description

Each portion forming a reduced-size copy of the whole, a fractal is forever fragmented, both chaotic and ordered, endlessly complex.  Timothy Green’s American Fractal sees this pattern emerge from the fabric of modern culture, as it navigates the personal, the political, and the metaphysical, in a lyric dreamscape in which an eerie chaos lurks just behind the façade of order—where “what looks like / a river...could be a log,” “…as if accident were / the fundamental attribute of life.”  In separate poems, one man sells ad space on his forehead, while another examines the multitudes of his own voice on an audio cassette recorder.  Each life is but another section of the fractal, the past and the future two mirrors that face each other to perpetuate the illusion of infinites.  At turns evocative and sweetly ironic, Green straddles the line between accessibility and complexity, exploring “how the wind whispers our secrets,” how “that little tremor” of understanding “touches your sleeve, lets go.”

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Product Details

• Paperback: 104 pages
• Publisher: Red Hen Press; 1 edition (February 15, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1597091308
• ISBN-13: 978-1597091305
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,759,329 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A book of poems that's not a waste of money, for a change, May 16, 2009

By	Alejandro Escude (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Timothy Green's first collection is a great read, and difinitely worth buying. I sat with this book of poems and came upon "Hiking Alone;" echos of Gary Snyder, and yet smoother, contemporary, but just as wise and fun. Then, "What Passes For Optimism at MacArthur Park," a perfect sonnet that also proves Green has, as Bukowski once said, "the stink of L.A. in [his] bones." After these two examples, I knew this book was better than any other collection I'd purchased in the last year. And I've bought a lot of poetry. The most amazing piece is the last poem, "In the Parking Lot of Our Dreams." I won't quote it here, just get it. This collection, at least for me, works best if read from the inside out. Eventually, almost every poem grows on you, which is very rare for a book of poems these days. Like fractals, it is a pattern that unfolds seemingly in an unpredictable way, but then manages to form coastlines, a world, and eventually an entire universe.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Lovely Beginning, March 17, 2009

By	Leslie Johnson - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I come from a school of thought that if a book has three or four really good poems that stick to your ribs, then, it's a success. American Fractal has that in spades. I just loved "Fifty-Hour Online Binge" & "What Passes for Optimism", which is a musical, pastoral gem. It's a fallback, old school kind of poem, clean, with euphonious lines that echo the work of Robert Lowell and Donald Justice. The poems, while graceful, seem born out of necessity, a kind of mild human obsession. It was Auden, I think, who contended, that he was writing his poems alone in his room for another anonymous lonely in his room. I get that sense that Green's poems are that personal, aware of their audience of one, intimate without being exclusive. "Microcassette" is a fabulous poem, maybe my favorite in the book, as in "Diorama". These poems feel like they had no possibility of being written by anyone else, which is the mark of a truly individual voice. The work is poetic without being self-conscious, a rare ability that I envy. This is a wonderful first book--but readers should not be deceived into thinking that Green's sense of humor and personality make these poems, in any way, slight. I encourage anyone interested in the present state of American poetry to read this book. It's worthwhile and a beautiful contribution to the American poetry scene

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Poems of Brilliance and Depth, February 18, 2009

By	Donald Mace Williams (Canyon, Texas USA) - See all my reviews

When I finished reading American Fractal, I went back and read it again, partly to coax some of the lines out of the first-reading haze that in my experience surrounds all poems of substance and partly because I wanted to relish the sounds and images again. A few of the fifty poems still remain, for my traditionalist mind, obscure, but the thing is that I can at least sense coherence in even the hardest, such as "The Body," and, most of all, I can enjoy the precise images and intriguing sounds: "starspecks in the foxglove," "a blind bat on a billboard unfurling leather wings / unfurling night," "costume jewelry that would stain a tiny finger green." That poem has the immediate attractiveness that calls me back to keep arranging and rearranging the shards, trying to put the vase together.
Most of these poems are as accessible as most of the ones that run in Rattle, of which Green is editor--and accessibility is the one stipulation he makes for submissions. The word "fractal," meaning an irregular shape whose small parts look like its larger parts, is new to me, but fortunately the poems don't carry out the threat of higher geometry. They content themselves with being passionate, reflective, imaginative, frightened, and funny, like all fine poems. One of my favorites is "Cooking Dinner," in which the speaker's sensibility and vulnerability are so heightened that his whole body seems to be receiving grim signals from the world the way silver fillings in teeth can pick up radio broadcasts. Another is "Hiking Alone," with a powerful image of a creek flowing out of dark caves into light and back into darkness. A fish passes through and sees itself, presumably for the first time, before plunging "back into his comfortable / dark, this eyelet the only opening for miles." And I love "In the Parking Lot of Our Dreams," which is as brown as Hardy's "Neutral Tones" is gray, though to a far more cheerful effect. The only change of color comes when a woman on a ladder, painting a building brown, "reaches up / to draw a second coat / over the highest rung / and a bluebird tattoo / rises from her waistline / like the morning sun." I hope I was right to chuckle at the poet's decision at the end to spend his few remaining coins on a cup of (brown) coffee and a (brown) Milky Way.
Most of the Fractal poems are in free verse, but barely so, often divided into shapely stanzas and sometimes containing a number of unobtrusively iambic lines. A few poems are formal, including three sonnets; a few are made up of brief, unpunctuated, uncapitalized phrases that float amid wide blank spaces like a sky full of small clouds. This collection, Green's first, is both brilliant and moving, and, since he's still in his twenties, we can surely hope to see more and more of his superb work.