The Unsubscriber: Poems [Hardcover]

Bill Knott (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0374264155 | ISBN-13: 978-0374264154 | Publication Date: October 6, 2004 | Edition: First Edition

Eavesdroppers fear
the hermit's soliloquy.

Wake up, wound, the knife said.
--from "To Live By"

Bill Knott's poetic manner--surreal yet vernacular, outrageous and tender--is unlike anything in contemporary American verse. In The Unsubscriber, he investigates cloning laboratories and spaceships, cemeteries and battlefields, talks to Damocles and pokes fun at Hamlet, witnesses the moments before a seduction, and charts maps in the stars and in forests. Knott tells fables, poses questions, shadows spies, and breathes new life into poetry's oldest stories: love and war. The Unsubscriber is the first new book in a decade by a fiercely iconoclastic American poet deserving of a wide audience.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Knott's wordplay, compression and bitingly skeptical point of view have given his verse (especially his many sonnets) cult status for decades. His first effort since Laugh at the End of the World: Collected Comic Poems (2000) shows his verbal agility at work in all sorts of short forms. Some of the love poems here, whose careful simplicity recalls Robert Creeley, may stand among Knott's best, as when he compares a romantic couple to a facing-page translation: "we fear closing the book/ will bring us face to face, mouth to mouth with/ that tongue we've always/ lost and can never kiss." The sonnet "Sub/Unsub" makes an elegant answer to Elizabeth Bishop's "Sonnet"; "A Lesson from the Orphanage" makes an appalled response to the Iraq war—"If you beat up someone smaller than you/ they won't (and histories prove this) tell." A sheaf of very short poems (several taken from Poetry magazine and the New Yorker) showcases Knott at his epigrammatic best; a sequence of wordier poems attacking war, sexism and masculinity (many with lengthy footnotes) shows him at a far lower level ("my crime my Y/ chromosome"), as does a clotted set of adaptations and translations at the end. It can be hard to know when Knott strives deliberately for awkwardness and when this self-described "windowkeeper/ of the Tower of Babel" has simply let down his guard.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

What doesn't Knott subscribe to? Believing only what you see and hear. Simplistic answers. The cult of the automobile. Praise of war. A nimble metaphysical poet given to surrealism, elegant yin-yang perceptions, and wry romanticism, Knott, whose first collection appeared in 1968, is a proverbial breath of fresh air. Great fun to read and complex enough to demand rereading, he is given to scintillating brevity in poems that neatly upend unexamined assumptions, and he turns out splendid long poems. "Relics with Old Blue Medicine-Type Bottle: To X," for example, is a discerning, thrilling rendering of the strategic courtship between two veterans of the heart. Musings on boyhood memories, our tendency to lose sight of the grander scheme of existence, Damocles' sword, our love of gadgets: all convene in this sly and timely collection, a charming yet searing contemplation of life's dualities and a critique of humankind's penchant for violence and ecologically dire habits of consumption. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 136 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (October 6, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374264155
• ISBN-13: 978-0374264154
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #841,268 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good Work From Knott, December 6, 2004

By 

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

I enjoyed a lot of THE UNSUBSCRIBER, though some of the poems are weak. FS&G are promoting this book (well, sort of, actually they are sneaking it in under the radar) as though it were the work of an underground genbius like Bill Hicks whom they are magically bringing into light, but the truth is that many poetry readers have been familiar with Knott's work for a long, long time.

Unlike the reviewer from Publishers Weekly, I thought the best part of the book was its last section, entitled "Poems After," each one inspired by a poet who has gone before -- most of them now deceased. Knott has a thick, rich, whiskey-soaked voice and his various tributes and homages or "profiles" as he calls them are generally pitched in a lower key than the original. I liked especially his poem called "On The Road" in which he takes the characters and zeitgeist of Kerouac's poetic novel and castigates them for doing too much driving and using too many fossil fuels: "faster faster never slow/ on the road to ecocide." It's not something I had ever thought of before.

Knott has wonderfully thorny poems about the difficulties of growing up and growing older, and one of the best in the book is his memory poem about grade school called, "Mrs. Frye And The Pencil Sharpener" which I wish I could quote in full to you. He is endlessly quotable, and he embodies some of the lessons of transparency that the Russian poets like Mandelstam and the South American fictionists like Borges were so good at. When he is clumsy and awkward you often feel that he meant to be so, for some unspoken yet unchallengable reason, like John Wayne's acting.

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The greatest neglected American poet, December 21, 2004

By 

Stuart (Toronto, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Unsubscriber: Poems (Hardcover)

It's great to see Knott back with a major publisher after his years in the desert. And The Unsubscriber is a fantastic survey of what he's been up to over the past decade or so. Some of the most audacious, outspoken, and outright funny stuff being written in the U.S. One of the few poets who can deliver a stiff political message in the context of GOOD poetry!