Poems I Wrote While Watching TV (Paperback)

~ Travis Jeppesen and Jeremiah Palecek (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"An artfully fractured vision of memory and escape, Victims maintains a rigorous structure throughout—even when the aliens show up." -- Michael Miller, Village Voice

Praise for Jeppesen’s novel Victims:

"Jeppesen’s novel has the potential to change your life." -- Michael Schaub, Bookslut

Praise for Jeppesen’s novel Victims: “Jeppesen’s novel has the potential to change your life.” --Michael Schaub, Bookslut

“An artfully fractured vision of memory and escape, Victims maintains a rigorous structure throughout—even when the aliens show up.” --Michael Miller, Village Voice

Product Description

Travis Jeppesen’s debut collection Poems I Wrote While Watching TV is a ruthlessly implosive meditation on the death of language in a media-saturated world. Perfectly complimented by Jeremiah Palecek’s sardonic illustrations, Poems I Wrote While Watching TV ponders the mundane and the un-nameable with a highly personal mixture of devastation and humor.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 80 pages
• Publisher: Blatt Books (March 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1599713403
• ISBN-13: 978-1599713403
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 6.3 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,605,352 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars "A Ticket to the Dream", June 27, 2006

By	Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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Physically a very handsome book, and the drawings and watercolor work by Jeremiah Palecek show an eccentric wit and a pallid dash, and yet the real revelation here will be Travis Jeppesen's poetry. Jeppesen lives in Prague, and writes in English, like an angel. Those who have read his critical writing, or his debut novel VICTIMS, are in for yet another treat, but I should say first off that his poetry isn't quite what you'd expect, it's much more gestural and surrealist than his prose writing and for that reason alone sometimes a bewildering experience, like being thrown into a maelstrom without so much as a paddle's worth of context.

Was he watching TV when he wrote these poems? Maybe; they exhibit some of the rapidfire disconnect between image and line that you feel when zapping s remote from channel to channel, and yet paradoxically the suite of "TV Haiku," for sure the ones most obviously about the television experience, are the most placid and focussed, like oild school haiku with the requisite number of syllables. It's elsewhere, away from the TV, that the madness rises to high intensity, as image upon image rains down from a mackerel sky upon the reader, like crockery from a high window, so that the experience of reading something like his "Pippi Longstocking" poem is like dodging a poisonous hailstorm. Keeps you on your mark, this writing does. If JG Ballard had turned to poetry while in the middle of writing CRASH and ATROCITY EXHIBITION, he still would have been lucky to have hit the heights of PIWWWTV.

I didn't cotton one hundred per cent to "The Bath," and yet it seems an experiment worth taking, perhaps a sort of cut up of bygone diction, or applying prose breaks to an ornate, bourgeois prose? And if ever I meet Jeppesen I'll ask him why he doesn't get someone else to write the titles of his poems, for he is invariably bad at them, in the sense that none of his titles come anywhere near the quality of his best poems, and that's an unusual weakness in one otherwise so talented. Outside of these picayune complaints, I bow down very low to this amazing, near-hallucinatory poetry. He makes me tremble. This past year we lost the surrealist master, Philip Lamantia, but from far off in Czechoslovakia his spirit rises again in this new boy.