Customer Reviews

Response (New American Poetry)

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"Response" is an awesome little book, full of true alien possession and non-ego voices from beyond the self, voicing outside in the mass media, wandering from beyond the grave. A spooky and exacting text, would not make good bedtime reading but you should visit there if you want to try on another kind of poetics from the post-language school of trans-ego poetics. Juliana Spahr is a gifted and giving poet, whose works will create their own new world ordering of the real. Cosmic and local at the same time, spooky and lyrical, exacting at all points. A powerful first book of many to come.

Juliana Spahr's first full-length collection, Response, is in many regards a literary contradiction. For although Spahr evinces an impeccable knowledge of contemporary theory with its penchant for devaluing emotive meaning, her work is in no way a simple exercise in the problematics of language. Perhaps responding to what Harold Bloom calls "a tradition too wealthy to need anything more," Spahr abandons a contemporary poetics obsessed with the accrual of style, insisting instead on a plain, anti-lyrical poetics of witness....Because she strives to encompass the broadest dimensions of the human condition‹-mortality, disease, the confusion of identity‹-Spahr has no need to display a refined poetic palette (though the intelligence of her writing suggests that this palette is available to her). In fact it would appear that she deliberately forgoes refinement in an effort to make herself clear.