Betsy Andrews’s sweeping, energetic, book-length poem pounds the pavement of the New Jersey Turnpike, driving through America—past landfills and wetlands and weapons labs—under the towering shadows of engines, oil, and war. With a disarmingly unique voice that evokes the tradition of Pound and Eliot, Whitman and Williams and Ginsberg, Andrews creates a pastiche of landscape, consciousness, history, and politics in this American age.
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Editorial Reviews
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"New Jersey hotwired, New Jersey on speed: the Turnpike unrolls its scathing demotic across the humiliated landscape that was once a bright idea; the Turnpike dreams of minutemen and wakes to Abu Ghraib; the Turnpike names its toll plazas for poets and founding fathers and channels its weary to Burger Kings and ATMs. No help for us, the country's in the breakdown lane. But Betsy Andrews writes its antic obit in a vein so charged with wit and razzle-dazzle that something must be salvageable even now. We must, in spite of ourselves, have done something right. New Jersey is a brilliant debut."—Linda Gregerso
“Serving the swerve from witness to outrage, the poem follows war's disastrous trajectory from domestic to international policy and singular to universal tragedy with unrelenting honesty. Andrews has a queer eye for empire, and this work is an incisive, exciting, and necessary intervention."—Brian Teare, author of The Room Where I Was Born
"The heart of darkness is alive and beating in Betsy Andrews's New Jersey. This well-investigated sweep of a poem builds and passionately sustains itself through many luminous hallucinatory details. With its commitment to naming, to witnessing the machinations and degradations of our 'terror,' this is a brave poem, and a necessary one."—Anne Waldman, The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics
About the Author
Betsy Andrews is author of She-Devil and In Trouble. Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared widely, in publications ranging from PRACTICE to the Yemeni newspaper Culture.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Where we look for America,
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This review is from: New Jersey (Brittingham Prize in Poetry) (Hardcover)
This latest On the Road salvo is a quest to make sense of speed, short attention spans, and the pastiche of bad taste and sheer stupidity and terror that some mistakenly think is the soul of America. Much closer to that complex, diverse and elusive soul is the passion and insight that compels Andrews through her journey of self-discovery and naming. Traveling the same physical and psychic highways as Williams and Pound before her, this new poet makes a compelling and impressive Statement of Arrival in this debut. This is a poet to listen to, to watch.
--Robert McDowell, author of a book on poetry in spiritual practice, which is due out later this year.
5.0 out of 5 stars
New Jersey by Betsy Andrews,
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This review is from: New Jersey (Brittingham Prize in Poetry) (Paperback)
Betsy Andrews's book-length poem, "New Jersey," is extremely exciting and thought-provoking. Betsy's passion and use of the English language are truly awe-inspiring. She's one of the country's most brilliant young poets. "New Jersey" is not to be missed by lovers of poetry and the English language.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Heavily grounded in industrial metaphor, New Jersey is keenly whetted with savage honesty,
By Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: New Jersey (Brittingham Prize in Poetry) (Paperback)
Winner of the 2007 Brittingham Prize in Poetry, New Jersey is a book-length, free-verse poem that weaves a diverse portrait of America, from its landfills and wetlands to its weapons labs, politics, and human consciousness. Heavily grounded in industrial metaphor, New Jersey is keenly whetted with savage honesty about the death of a thousand cuts inflicted by the demands of technology, war, industry, and pollution. "Turnpike immaculate, the salt marsh flanked in / masks, cupids, urns, plumage, syringes, food wrappers, cigarette butts, / the carved and gilded heraldry of a clean-up crew called Special Removal, / leasing themselves like automobiles registered to a series of dummy corporations / wraparound ballistics the belief in an extraordinary rendition of / the axiom 'let every soul be subject'".
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