Customer Reviews

Ten Thousand Good Mornings

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Ten Thousand Good mornings by James Reiss is a modern day classic. Reiss' is eloquent without being pretentious and by using the rules and forms of a thousand years of english he puts his own life, todays ideas and situations, into verbal symphonys even the worst of philistines would marvel at. Poetry in this new millenium takes a strong second to the larger media of television and film but, it's writing like Reiss' that shows us the power that the writen word can still have. Reiss' poems show the beauty and poinency of one mans memory, real or not, comedic or tragic, each line and each page deliver vivid pictures and deep emotion; creating images that I will never forget.

Ten Thousand Good Mornings is a beautiful collection of poetry that resonates with the heart of our times. Every poem leans towards the next and the next, until all poems in the collection bleed into each other.

The last section of Ten Thousand Good Mornings has a heading that scrambles the words of the book title. We end Ten Thousand Good Mornings with a poem called "Prelude" ....we begin our journey at the end of the book and the last "chapter" has a title that has turned over on itself.... A rather beautiful structure! At last, the book itself--the whole book--is structured as a single great poem. I was left feeling as if I could hear the echo of my first beautiful word.

Good stuff!

James Reiss' new book is notable for its verbal energy and play of diction and sound, an exploration of ethical and personal psychological situations and universal dilemmas. His wit is a way of confronting the sadnesses of our lives and times. His poems explore the inner and outer landscapes of a contemporary, deeply feeling and thinking human being. His most remarkable quality is the development of an engaging, confiding, colloquial style that is direct, down to earth and quite convincing in his unabashed and honest explorations of his subjects. At the heart of his poems there is an emotional, emotive voice without fear of sentiment. Yet the style is most interesting: a voice supple, flexible, personal and personable. This expansive expressiveness seems the basis of his ever-more (with each book) ambitious poetic explorations of forms and content, expanding into larger and more encompassing narrative elements. James Reiss' fine sense of emotional location "places" his active lines inside his personas' and his characters' psyches--and ultimately in ours.

I'm a creative writing student at Miami University, the Ohio school where Reiss teaches composition. I think the other reviews pretty much speak for themselves, so I'm just going to point out that the publisher of this book submitted it for consideration of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. And now I'm going to go log into our course scheduling site and try to get into one of his classes.

James Reiss' latest collection of poems Ten Thousand Good Mornings masterfully treads that thin line between tragedy and comedy with Reiss' use of formal, nursery-like rhyme colliding with subject matter such as death, divorce, racism, infidelity, and loneliness.

Reiss' bold exploitations of the traditional sonnet, and the combination of regular and irregular rhmes and meter create a fierce syncopation, encompassed by a language that is both idiomatic and carefully forged. Read "Woodruff Court" as an example:

. . . . Baloney on spumoni! This all-American Good Humor's no exotic gelato. My little dog laughs

to see such Sunday sports on down-home TV as I have guffawed at & shall rejoice in

till the sky breaks faith & it rains cats & dogs & my new-seeded lawn runs away with the water.

There are unforgettable, more serious poems, such as "Cycle", in which a man, distraught with his losses, cries out, "I take my life and shake it by the hair/who what why when where"; and "The Times," another stark poem in which a man, who has spoken on the telephone with a woman who is obviously another significant other, quickly dismisses that relationship:

It took no time to say goodnight & find the cradle for the phone,

then step into a darker room & cradle someone else in bed.

Finally, Reiss' poems reach out to more global issues such as childhood violence. In the shocking "Popular Mathematics", "a skinny kid" contemplates murdering his teacher and classmates, thinking "how the law/of averages might save one person/ while/ others meant to die would be divided". Read for yourself to see how this poem ends.

Ten Thousand Good Mornings contains a powerful variety of hilarity, somberness, tenderness, and local color meeting with the global. Reiss' craftsmanship may leave you dazed at times, and not knowing whether to laugh or cry. I wholeheartedly and highly recommend this book for its incredible range of tone, emotion, and depth of exploration all under one cover. Bravo!