Customer Reviews

I Am Secretly An Important Man

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This collection of previously unpublished works by Steven J. Bernstein provides readers with an over-view of his multiple narrative voices, styles, and themes. Fans of Bernstein's spoken-word performances may find this collection more accessible than his longer works (The Wraith and Hermoine). Furthermore, Grant Alden's introduction to this collection positions Bernstein's shorter prose in relation to his other fiction, musical work, and biographical/fictional life. While no one volume could capture the Post-Beat deconstruction of form, the self-depricating satire and fluid hallucinations, the thoughts of a man as they turn upon and brutally lascerate his own bound-and-gagged self, this collection of Bernstein's prose gives readers glimpses of his rage, his humiliation, and his annihilation.

This is best book I have read in a long time. Bernstein's writing is gripping and vivid, and one of the most original things I've ever read.

bernstein makes you see the brutality and evil in the world. each story is a facet in the gem of this book. a real must read.

the work of bernstein is moving and disturbing. his style is unlike anything I have ever read before or since. If you are looking for a book with brutal honesty and raw force this is it!

"If you dare condemn my life, it will come after you with a sharpened rake!" said Steven Jesse Bernstein, the legendary dark sun shining in the steel-grey of a Seattle sky. (...) had come into his own a s a poet...all he had to do was wield a pen and scrawl what was already there, gushing out so fast he had to catch it all in his hands or it would be lost forever...(...) ...Read the works of a man from the very streets you come from, (...) ...You need take this Writer's works with you as a close and trusted companion, both Poetry and Prose, it's more than Lost than anything the Lost generation made out with like bandits; more Beat than anything the Beats as its got a modernized Rhythmic Bass back-beat to it, all the more akin to old Blues than Jazz, and the only generation is the Generation X=conmmunicated, where the only "alternative" is drugs or death, otherwise the compromise of a scared hypocrite wanting to repeat the secure sins of those who are of an entirely different breed of poets altogether...no, Bernstein knew what he was; and even more than that he focused on what he had become (...)
(...)

The past two decades haven't treated Jesse Bernstein right.
This guy should be giant, a posthumous shadow over more recent midgets, a Macy's balloon students point up and gape.
Instead we slipped him under the rayon comforter of the Seventies and looked elsewhers. And what have we turned up? Rappers? Slammers? Jesse was way more, and he did it first.
Affable and unpretentious, as more tortured souls should strive to be, Jesse has the aura of a natural. He never tried to be a poet: it was just the only way he could contrive to communitcate with the rest of us.
He was a genius in live performance: an unpredictable presence and voice onstage, a klaxon of angst and metastiphor. Now we have a few books.

What you need to do is read them. And see

I Am Secretly An Important Man, is one of my favorite books of poetry, stories..Jesse Burnstein is fantastic. I would say it is for the mature.

Bernstein's work screams TRUTH