Customer Reviews

With Strings

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"In With Strings, Charles Bernstein plays `Charles Bernstein' with furious comedic virtuosity, very much as Lenny Bruce played `Lenny Bruce' or Charlie Chaplin `Charlie Chaplin.' The comparison of this remarkable collection of poems with the work of such serious and defiant comedians is indicative of only one facet of Bernstein's writings, but it is apt: his work is iconoclastic and revolutionary. Bernstein's poetry, however, is driven by aesthetic as well as social passions. The poems that are With Strings are addressed to the great questions perpetually facing art: What is it? Why is it? How is it? And in this context, inevitably, the presence of artlessness is discovered close at hand, never to be subsumed. It is in poetry's encounter with what is never to be subsumed that the brilliance of Bernstein's work erupts."
-Lyn Hejinian
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"Charles Bernstein is one of the finest poets writing today, and certainly one of our greatest satirists. His poetry presents a profound and highly individual critique of contemporary half-truths, speech forms, and modes of expression, and does it so graphically and with such great good humor that the reader is left breathless-laughing and crying at the same time as the shocks of recognition register."
-Marjorie Perloff

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A companion to the critically acclaimed My Way, Charles Bernstein's 1999 montage of essays, conversations, and poems, With Strings catapults Bernstein into the future of American poetry. A compilation of sixty-nine poems in various forms and styles, dating mostly from the 1990s, With Strings is his most buoyant collection to date. With its fractured nursery rhymes, distressed mottoes, runcible riddles, and inscrutable sayings, Bernstein takes us on a poetic trip that swerves from the comic to the political, from the whimsical to the elegiac.

Bernstein remains one of America's liveliest advocates and practitioners of radically inventive poetry. The title of his new collection, With Strings, suggests the lush arrangement of a musical work as well as the unacknowledged implications of our everyday agreements. Just as language binds us together with its associated meanings, With Strings bounces against the ties that rend us apart as they fasten us together.

From his samplings of everyday life, to his demented yet sonorous iambic beats, Bernstein has once again created a poetry of our time, for our time, and by our time.

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Charles Bernstein is the Director of the Poetics Program at the State University of New York at Buffalo. In addition to My Way, he is the author of two collections of essays, A Poetics and Content's Dream, and more than twenty books of poems, including Republics of Reality: 1975-1995, Islets/Irritations and Rough Trades.