Key Bridge [Paperback]

Ken Rumble (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 27, 2007 | ISBN-10: 0932112544 | ISBN-13: 978-0932112545

Key Bridge is a poem about race, sex, birth, and death set against the backdrop of Washington, D.C. Traveling through the city s present and past, its geography, its dream-world double, and its flora and fauna, Key Bridge examines the gap between Washington s day-to-day street-life and its status as a tourist spot and seat of the federal government. The city is presented as constantly shifting and evolving, a place that is impossible, finally, to pin down.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Capturing all its contradictions, this poem evokes Washington D.C. so powerfully that it brings the whole nation s contradictions along with it. Here is our racism, our blindness, and our brilliance, all composing a flickering, echoing city. Rumble has reawakened the bridge as metaphor, and with it, given us a moment to pause in mid-air, look around, and take stock. Given his vivid, incantatory language, it s a startling view. --Cole Swenson

And ambitious study of polis, power and memory... raising candid questions about the bridges that we cross and the troubled waters around us." --Lisa Jarnot

Despite Rumble's wry protestation of being safe in sound, this book ranges magnificently from its cell. At once the journal of two-plus bad years in Babylon, a psychic geography of D.C. and its implications, and a blistering investigation of the unstableness of color-as-metaphor Ken Rumble s Bridge is, finally, a great deal more than some ceremonial key to a fabled city this key gifts its recipient with unlikely knowledge. Key Bridge is a book of exceptions, a close telling of jeopardies and penchants, a gift of directions. --C. S. Giscombe

About the Author

Ken Rumble was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up just outside the District in Chevy Chase, Maryland. He serves as the director of the Desert City Poetry Series and is a member of the Lucifer Poetics Group. His poems have appeared in journals such as Talisman, the tiny, effing magazine, Parakeet, Carolina Quarterly, and Cross Connect. He lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, with his partner and daughter.

Product Details

• Paperback: 72 pages
• Publisher: Carolina Wren Press (March 27, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0932112544
• ISBN-13: 978-0932112545
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 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: #3,791,786 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "There's Only One Story, Yours", May 4, 2007

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Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Key Bridge (Paperback)

A few years back I hailed a book of poetry called BLUE MOUND TO 161 by Garin Cycholl as the heir to Metcalf, Niedecker, Olson, Tolson and Dorn and their elaborated sense of space, their reading of history as a (sometimes violent) unfolding. Cycholl's book is still worth seeking out, but along comes Ken Rumble's KEY BRIDGE, which applies a slightlfy different sort of pressure points than Cycholl, but which aims for a similar breadth of scope in its psychobiography of an American place. Both poets find themselves and their surround haunted by the spectres of race and of Lionel Trilling's "dark and bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet."

Politics skitter over Washington DC like locusts in some plague land of desert, until even the very earth seems unstable. The "Key Bridge," named after Francis Scott Key, is fitting enough, an aqueduct bridge, a "bridge of water over water," Rumble observes. Like the Florida Everglades there's no firm ground in all of his book to stand on, the space beneath one's feet a murky, liquefying perhaps. However Rumble finds the good with the bad: "Dear Reader," he tells us, "There is/ so much to love." And he makes you believe it.

He's not above the rhetorical gestures of the early American modernists like Frost, Robinson, Lindsay, Jeffers; he addresses the Beltway snipers by name, probing the intricacies of their relationship with an unexpected tenderness, an oldfashioned direct address. And there's that brutal offhand vein of Dos Passos "overheard," as when Rumble compiles a list of the awful things white men have said to him over the years, about their black neighbors. These are broken down by district, and then, in another poem, the white people rank the districts themselves ("wouldn;t be caught there after dark") to build up his phantasmagoric construct of a city bitterly divided against itself, trembling on the edge of the intangible. He walks with L'Enfant and Ben Banneker, the original designers of the city, who "drew the lives they made," and as I see it this book might be Rumble's own attempt at a homage to such imagination.

Of course we can't see the West with the freshness and hope we used to have, but vestiges of this spirit remain hovering above the land like heat vapors. "Don't be delicate," he reminds himself. And for Rumble it's always back to the particulars, the gritty details, names of flowers, people, streets, hills and tasks ("I have to get groceries/ to cook dinner/ to balance my checkbook," he confesses, for somehow by naming these names he comes to own them, like Adam. Likewise dates are important--each poem is named by a date eg "10.April.2001."

KEY BRIDGE comes alive pretty early and stays that way almost to the end, where it starts to fall off just a little. I can't otherwise recommend too heartily this glowing, buzzing atlas of a book, its ambition and its vision, its beauty fragile as a jar of fireflies dashed into the night sky.