Interloper: Poems [Paperback]

L. S. Klatt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 30, 2009

In the United States, where much of the daily discourse appears to be reduced to matters of dollars and cents, the poet is an interloper who traffics where he doesn t belong. L. S. Klatt is vividly aware of this phenomenon. For him, words are musical and versatile, more about play than utility, and he seeks to dislocate language, to freelance and maneuver, to alter common sense on the way to new sense.
The poems in Interloper unsettle frontiers between disparate worlds so that the imagination is given room to roam: pears become guitars, racks of ribs are presented as steamboats, and helicopters transmute into diesel seraphs. The poetry aspires acrobatically in the manner of prayers and pilots, but adventure throughout the book is viewed as precarious and the will to conquest leads to apocalypse and ruin. The interloper wanders through crime scenes and crash sites as he glosses the landscape at home and not at home with the America of yesterday and tomorrow. In symbols that scat and ricochet, the interloper scores a new song, one that composes and decomposes on the page.

Editorial Reviews

Review

There are cows of a higher mathematics in Interloper s pages. Invention, imagination, thinking invited to test what is new, what hasn't been imagined these are given pride of place in Klatt s poems. . . . The book is a field guide for any mind exercising to learn unknown transfers and connecting combinations. --Dara Wier, author of Reverse Rapture

In his first book, Juniper Prize winner Klatt marches through the jungle of overused words and symbols to create a refined language yearning to be new. . . . Klatt's poems are charged with primeval energy that rejects finalities in meaning and embraces the act of becoming. The result is rewarding reading for those who seek a unique and fresh poetic voice. --Library Journal, August 2009

About the Author

L. S. Klatt teaches in the English Department at Calvin College. His poems have been published in many literary magazines, including the Colorado Review, Boston Review, New Orleans Review, and Verse.

Product Details

• Paperback: 80 pages
• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press; 1 edition (April 30, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1558496971
• ISBN-13: 978-1558496972
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,403,991 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Intrepid Interloper, September 11, 2009

By 

Gabriel Kruis (Brooklyn, New York) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Interloper: Poems (Paperback)

Ideas in Interloper cruise like planetesimals through space. Concrete in a void, but falling brilliantly to pieces. In their ore they match Earth's make-up, but their tireless trajectories are distinct. They are alien, desolate and intrepid.

Without cohesion, they share elements with one another, and it is evident they issue from the same source. But Klatt's identity as a speaker is chimerical. Oddball. He is an interloper if not the Interloper of whom he speaks. He is a magician presticogitating rocketships, and making the poems his captain's log.

Instead of Arithmetic, he uses metaphors to plot their course. Instead of Science, he charts their elements in simile. But don't misunderstand, his words hinge on both of these fields, demonstrating how poetry is a pungent science. A magical mathematics.

Because of this, Klatt's poetics defy poetry. In poems such as, "Reliquary," "Magnolia," and "Siren in Middle Age," Klatt delves beyond the limited orthography of the Latin Alphabet, employing self-constructed ideograms, charts, graphs, and musical notation to catalog his mercurial subjects.

Where normally this requires pretension from the poet, these schematics don't take themselves too seriously. They engage the reader in a sort of baffling comedy; it is as if the reader is deciphering simple Egyptian hieroglyphs, using the voice of the poet as a singing Rosetta stone.

I don't want to give the impression that all of the subject matter is spacebound. It isn't. Several poems are dedicated to the bucolic. To root vegetables and fruits. But even in his rustic poems, he is able to create a cosmic feel. As in "Fetus in Orbit," where he speaks lovingly of primordial cows. Poems like this, and poems like, "Test Pilots Among the Haymakers," "Lines composed on an Open Space," and "Wandering of Light," make it obvious that Klatt's poems are about frontiers. About unexplored spaces, using unexplored diction.

Despite their cosmic ideas, all of his poems are brief. No longer than a page. Efficient and meteoric. And after reading this book, we can't know if Klatt wrote the rocketship to study the comets, or to join them. But this much we do know: to be the poet is to be the pilot and it takes guts to tackle asteroids.