Logicalogics: Poems [Paperback]

Ronald Palmer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 10, 2005

These poems showcase Ronald Palmer's innate gift for wordplay and verbal experimentation and reflect his peculiarly modern consciousness, formed by a clinically dysfunctional family and the experience of coming out as a queer young man within the AIDS pandemic. Palmer integrates styles as disparate as those of e. e. cummings and Gertrude Stein with the tropes of gender, sexuality, and queer theory to create a lyrical poetry of fractured dream-language and jumpy rhythms that's both new and disturbingly familiar.

Product Details

• Paperback: 120 pages
• Publisher: Soft Skull Press (July 10, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1932360883
• ISBN-13: 978-1932360882
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 7.9 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 0.8 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: #2,638,461 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excitement of a New Palmer, October 12, 2005

By 

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

LOGICALOGICS may be Ronald Palmer's first book of poems, but it has the assurance and swagger of one who's been around the block and up and down the waterfront more than once. We've been needing a poet like Palmer for as long as I can remember, and if he hadn't existed, it would have been necessary for one of us, or a committee, to invent him. A poet who is comfortable with politics and sex as he is with Blanchot and Wittgenstein, and who seems to have diverted streams of Language-centered poetry into the spurting stream of spoken word and performance derived, oral-based, shamanic diagetics, Ronald Palmer has the real thing going on, and his book is the answer to a maiden's dream in more ways than one would have thought possible.

Pages of dithyrambs, redolent of Blake, Hart Crane, Allen Ginsberg, storm up the edge of the page and tumble down the next. There's a poem about sitting on a sizable sex toy that, like the intrusive rubber spear it celebrates, only hurts for the first four inches. Best of all are Palmer's plays on words, which spring naturally everywhere; he sees the beauty even in the joins between, so that not only in line breaks but in syllable breaks does he find room to breathe and space to grow these astonishing vines of language, like kudzu, like sex kudzu, so intimate with your body it will make you cry out with a pleasure akin to pain.

I wondered how the lyrics of this standout live performer would look written down and, while you miss some of his bellowing, whispering cathedral organ of voices, instead you have the time to stare these words in the face, and time to admire the firm construction and sleek lines of each poem. It will take me awhile to understand Palmer's taxonomy of "logics," out of which he has seemingly constructed a whole new architectronics of poetry. But I've got time. One final caveat: don't ask for this book thinking you're getting a MICHAEL Palmer book, for you're in for a whole different kettle of poisson.