On the Cave You Live In [Paperback]

Philip Jenks (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 18, 2002

Poetry. ON THE CAVE YOU LIVE IN is Philip Jenks' first full-length collection. His poems are both intimate and strange, encompassing personal history and the politics of Appalachia, epileptic seizures and Baptist glossolalia, memory cells and Kentucky coal mines. His cave describes the limits of what's known, and his poems explore the "spaces between the aura and the jolt." "At various turns hieratic and profane, their blur the blur--in equal parts--of the confessed and the prophetic, these poems direct us to the language that starts just past 'that point/ where nothing is not.' Cassandra lives there; and Stein--and so does Philip Jenks"--Carl Phillips.

Product Details

• Paperback: 50 pages
• Publisher: Flood Editions; 1 edition (January 18, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0971005923
• ISBN-13: 978-0971005921
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.2 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,523,910 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars bodes well for 2002, March 15, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: On the Cave You Live In (Paperback)

Philip Jenks has written a poetry of shards and ruins washed up from the Monongahela with Appalachian spirit, linguistic acumen, wit and terror. Some might note a disjuncture of sequencing, I find these disjunctures - the spaces between the poems - like the spaces between image and sound, audience, writer, reception and dictation. What is said and what is unsaid cohere in pithy and vibrant flashes of lyric. For what it's worth, I don't know who to compare Jenks to - all the better.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Praise from Boston Review, September 10, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: On the Cave You Live In (Paperback)

"Philip Jenks should be feared for what he's yet to write. His first full-length book reads as if Patmos had been an island in West Virginia, and now that Jenks is back among us, all will be converted to `The New Jesus,' or at least made to look back over our shoulders. These are poems of reckoning, and poems to be reckoned with. Some of what sets Jenks apart from the slew of `new American voices' is his comfort under a quilt of dialects, and with schools of thought that run the table up through a Foucaultian paranoia (in the foreboding `Panoptikos') to the domestically ominous eye that his mother paints on the clock: `His speech is from crevices / running diagonal through the /underneath what was A&P.'"

--Christopher Mattison, Boston Review

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the new new American poetry, August 29, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: On the Cave You Live In (Paperback)

Philip Jenks has written one of the first great books of poetry in America in this new century. I can't think of a stranger, more necessary set of poems than those gathered here. Superficially, Jenks appears to have been schooled in some of the tactics of Language poetry, but the disjunctions of these lyrics feel less theorized than Language work and much more embodied, as in a spasm or a psychic hiccup. The "hypothetical antipodes," for example, engages the idea of an upside-down netherworld as a map of perverse inner space perfectly reflecting an injust outer world. It's as if Blake had read Olson or Hannah Arendt. "My mind gleams like the fangs/ of a viper in white heat/ dying to sink my teeth into/ the throat of something wrong." I noticed that Peter O'Leary unpacks some of the poems in this book (already!) in his book on Robert Duncan, Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan and the Poetry of Illness. Evidently, Jenks has epilepsy and O'Leary tries to attribute some of the aspects of his poetry to this condition. Whether you buy this connection, you should buy this book regardless. It is unconditionally terrific. Essential.