Jab (Phoenix Poets) [Paperback]

Mark Halliday (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0226313867 | ISBN-13: 978-0226313863 | Publication Date: October 15, 2002 | Edition: 1

Human, hunger, happiness, hope, heart, and Halliday all start with h, as does ham. Accident? Maybe! But seldom have the flour of the humanistic and the egg yolk of honesty mixed more swellingly with the yeast of desire and the salt of self-doubt—not to mention the olive paste of ambition.

Halliday has whacked Death and Mutabilitie before, but this time . . . this time he whacks them again. After this Jab, the world will never be the same. Or at least, a few hundred conversations, here and there, will be somewhat affected. Roll over Death, and tell Mutabilitie the news.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

With his fourth book of verse, the aptly titled Jab, the Ohio-based poet-critic Mark Halliday (Selfwolf) veers skillfully between autobiographical reminiscence and bleakly comic free-associations, offering late-baby-boomer slices of life along with up-to-date self-consciousness (somewhere between James Tate and Albert Goldbarth). One moment he promises "a poem so rich it made normal living look like sawdust"; the next he's "telling stories about our absent-minded teachers/ who forgot damn near everything except what they really loved."
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From The New Yorker

Writing as a baby boomer chagrined to find his dreams intact after decades of mild disappointment, Halliday is not fashionable. He is prolix and quotidian, a Whitman in a supermarket, a confessional poet who does not take himself very seriously. In one poem, he answers a colleague's challenge: "Poems should be aggressively fictive / since fictivity is mandated anyway. I guess I dig." His cool patter skewers pomposity—and itself, being so self-consciously out of date. Halliday speaks in dissonant cultural registers, defying irony: "To dissolve into a category, / is that why I marched this far … / lugging these bags and parcels bedecked with surprising stickers?"
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

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Product Details

• Paperback: 104 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition (October 15, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226313867
• ISBN-13: 978-0226313863
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6.3 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #951,442 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars American Trickster, September 4, 2004

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Private Citizen "PC" (Oxford MS) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Jab (Phoenix Poets) (Paperback)

First of all, I can't believe that no one has reviewed Mark Halliday's brilliant new book in this space before; the guy is fast becoming an essential American poet, with a body of work both high caliber and high volume. Jab may be an even better book than Tasker Street, which is a contemporary classic. Halliday is both astute, bitter, humane, and wildly original, alternately satirical and tender, capable of real lyricism- in the intensely personal family poems here- and dextrously clever in his deconstructive attacks on American pretentiousness of all kinds-- academic, classist, yuppie, postmodern, consumeristic. Here we see a poet related to Frank O Hara, but who has invented a voice (voices) entirely his own, in which he has gained a fluency and ease, a surprising improvisatory abandon to envy. All these punky little experimentalists should take a look at a pro, and read Halliday, who can slamdunk D.A Powell, Karen Volkman, and the whole Fence catalogue together. This poetry is modern, hip, all of that--but also a defense of the human, and of the humanizing wit....