Customer Reviews

On the Cave You Live In

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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.

"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

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.