Into It: Poems [Hardcover]

Lawrence Joseph (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 25, 2005

Strikingly contemporary new work by an acclaimed poet

Into It, Lawrence Joseph's fourth book of poems, is as bold a book as any in American poetry today-an attempt to give voice to the extremes of American reality in the time since, as Joseph puts it, "the game changed."

Joseph's first three books dramatized the challenge of maintaining one's self in a world in the hold of dehumanizing forces. The new book finds him in a time and place where "the immense enlargement / of our perspectives is confronted / by a reduction of our powers of action"-where the word "wargame" is a verb and "the weight of violence / is unparalleled in the history / of the species." Along the New York waterfront, on a crowded street, at the site where the World Trade Center stood: Joseph enters into these places to capture the thoughts and images, the colors and feelings, and the language that give the present its pressured complexity. Few contemporary writers have been able to shape this material into poetry, but Joseph has done so masterfully-in poems that are daring, searching, and classically satisfying.
Into It is a new work by a poet of great originality and scope.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

How can a poet's style reflect the dislocations of New York after 9/11, the insensate wreck he sees in American politics and the particular gifts and difficulties of Arab-American heritage? Joseph (Before Our Eyes) answers those questions in this, his fourth and strongest book of verse, with a dizzying mix of abstractions, urban details and nuggets of historical fact. (FSG will republish Joseph's first three books in September as Codes, Precepts and Taboos.) "The two things that are interesting," Lawrence muses, "are history and grammar," envisioning both as "wild and fragile." At times his verse focuses squarely on politics: "What—let's say— twelve years from now," he asks, "will the zone of suffering that exists/ outside the established orders look like?" In another poem, "The state of the physical world," finally, "depends on shifts in the delusional thinking/ of very small groups." The same poem brings in images from Revelations ("the seven-headed beast from the sea"), from Ground Zero, from factory life, from a photographic still life and from the hard life of the poet's immigrant father. Joseph's "dream technique" of juxtapositions and exclamations derives from the late style of Robert Lowell, from whom he also takes one of his titles, updating Lowell's Vietnam-era frustrations for the era of smart bombs and globalization. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Joseph is an attorney as well as a poet, which accounts for the legal tone of the title of his retrospective collection, Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos. Joseph also has a penchant for reasoning, yet these are molten works, and reading through his earlier poems is to journey through his poetic and philosophical development. Beneath the stable crust of memory is a search for identity. Joseph delves into his ancestry by considering his Lebanese and Syrian Catholic grandparents' homelands and history, and their place as Arab emigrants in the U.S. Through reflection on this heritage and the violence of his Detroit childhood, Joseph ponders anger, choice, and fate.

Into It, which collects his newest work, reveals a different poetic voice, one that is more abstract and fluid. Here Joseph is less narrative-based and more symbolic, less angry and more disillusioned, less personal and more universal. Many lyrics seem "coded" with essayistic digressions that gracefully intertwine question, observation, and emotion. Being a New Yorker in a 9/11 world has certainly resonated with Joseph, and the melancholy, grief, and hope of so many people coming to grips with large-scale violence is palpable. Many of these poems are deftly painted (perhaps an influence from his painter wife) with feeling as brushstroke, judgment as perspective, language as dimension, metaphor as theme. Janet St. John
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 80 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (August 25, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374175691
• ISBN-13: 978-0374175696
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #423,699 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Slim Volume That Speaks Loudly, September 13, 2005

By 

Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Into It: Poems (Hardcover)

The tragedy of September 11, 2001 ignited fear in all of us, the unexpected, the sudden change, the destruction of passivity, and the mourning and, gradually, the healing. Each of the arts has responded to this event in ways that allow tremulous minds to find some semblance of organization out of the chaos: John Adams' composition 'On the Transmigration of Souls' is one example of how artists find ways to make the unbelievable credible, restoring the ability to continue living.

Among the poets to respond to 9/11 is Lawrence Joseph who in this slim volume of 61 pages helps us as readers to find the path back to reality. It is as though Joseph first paused at the possibilities of terrorism, witnessed it first hand, and then walked among the rubble to find the cores of each of these strong poems to cry out against societal blindness, political shambles, views of the universe scrambled by that fateful event, and little picas of resilience. He doesn't leave the reader dangling with cosmic angst and anxiety, but instead ends up offering themes of hope. 'Have I mentioned my grandmother/my father's mother, who died long ago/ but who visits me in dreams?/ It's to her, mostly, I owe/ the feeling that, in cases of need,/ those transfigured in eternal love help us/ certainly with eternal,/ and, perhaps, also, with temporal gifts;/ that, in eternal love, all is gratis - / all that comes from eternal love/ is gratis.'

This is poetry for healing and for reading repeatedly. Lawrence Joseph has written more than just his fourth volume of fine poems: he has provided a path to Gilead. Grady Harp, September 05

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I love this poet, so intense!!!, July 5, 2011

By 

Ann V. Smith - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Into It: Poems (Hardcover)

Lawrence Joseph is a great poet, he captures what is happening today into his poems. He truly is an artist.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A POWERFUL AND IMPORTANT BOOK, September 6, 2007

By 

Michael Rudowsky (Boston, MA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Into It: Poems (Paperback)

A genuinely superb book of poems, in fact one of the most powerful and important books I've read in years. How, especially after 9/11 and the second Iraq war, do each of us confront accelerating domestic and worldwide violence? How do we live in a time since, as Joseph says, "The Game Changed"? How can poetry inform an age of technological revolutions, and social and political changes, on an increasingly global scale? In "Into It," Joseph, with his sharp eye and intellect and verbal skills, shows us how.