The Violence (New Series #11) [Paperback]

Ethan Paquin (Author)

Book Description

Series: New Series | Publication Date: January 1, 2005

Poetry. Ethan Paquin's third book is a sprawling meditation touching on the loss of love and commitment, the painfulness of memory, and the disorientation as well as the consolations of travel. The poems of THE VIOLENCE contain a rawness of emotion and clarity of feeling rare among writers of Paquin's generation. Where form plays a part, it is likely to be exploded: the poet's page becomes more of a canvas than a neutral vehicle. "THE VIOLENCE is a compact of determining forces both poet and language must survive, whether they be fact of a day's events or else lodged in the very fabric of language itself. It is Ethan Paquin's power that he can admit these furies and survive them"--Robert Creeley.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

With its mystical fragments, bluntly sexual invocations, and cryptic stanzas halfway between memories and magic spells, Paquin searches in this third collection for "someone please to tell time for the beneath"; he goes on to imagine the hidden forces "beneath" ordinary lives, among them death, lust and visions of eternity. Some pages are agrammatical, collage-like imprecations; others resemble prayers. Much of the work includes exclamations, some of them passionate, others comically random: "Come on in, cathedral!/ I won't harm you!" "I like being palatalized by rain!" Such visceral emphases sometimes bring to mind the spell-casting poetry of Robert Duncan, at other times a scrambled postmodern Dylan Thomas. Paquin (Accumulus) also uses the page as a canvas, turning the book sideways, leaving blank lines in place of key nouns, or otherwise making layout do expressive work: these interests recall Paquin's interest in design and form as editor of the on-line journal Slope. But he attends productively to far-flung natural landscapes, among them a Southwestern arroyo; most of the time, though, he focuses on the blood, sex, hopes and doubts he views as human universals. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Product Details

• Paperback: 80 pages
• Publisher: Ahsahta Press; 1st Printing 2005 edition (January 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0916272850
• ISBN-13: 978-0916272852
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.8 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,619,886 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If you're actually alive, then this is a book of poems you must read, January 21, 2006

By 

Jones Very - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Violence (New Series #11) (Paperback)

Urgent, heartbreaking, and sometimes weirdly humorous, the poems in Ethan Paquin's The Violence seem at every moment in the process of undoing themselves, wobbling back and forth, precariously, between fits of lovelorn tenderness and incredible rage. The epitome of edgy, these poems are ever in a process of shredding and healing, "I bestow upon thee, with this ochre, the violence/A swatch for you and I." It's as if the very language the poems are made of can't (or won't) allow itself to come to terms in the world, the world of love and violence, of poetry and speech. Reading Paquin, I think of poets as diverse and rangy as John Keats, Antonin Artaud and Charles Olson. And while these poets have influenced many of the younger generation of poets writing today, it's Paquin's formal inventiveness (some might even say recklessness), as well as his command of things like tone, diction and image (not to mention, subject matters all too human) that set him apart from his peers. Truly a beautiful, redemptive and inspiring book.