Into It
Poems
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Strikingly contemporary new work by an acclaimed poet
Into It, Lawrence Joseph's fourth book of poems, is as bold a book as any in American poetry today-an attempt to give voice to the extremes of American reality in the time since, as Joseph puts it, "the game changed."
Joseph's first three books dramatized the challenge of maintaining one's self in a world in the hold of dehumanizing forces. The new book finds him in a time and place where "the immense enlargement / of our perspectives is confronted / by a reduction of our powers of action"-where the word "wargame" is a verb and "the weight of violence / is unparalleled in the history / of the species." Along the New York waterfront, on a crowded street, at the site where the World Trade Center stood: Joseph enters into these places to capture the thoughts and images, the colors and feelings, and the language that give the present its pressured complexity. Few contemporary writers have been able to shape this material into poetry, but Joseph has done so masterfully-in poems that are daring, searching, and classically satisfying.
Into It is a new work by a poet of great originality and scope.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
How can a poet's style reflect the dislocations of New York after 9/11, the insensate wreck he sees in American politics and the particular gifts and difficulties of Arab-American heritage? Joseph (Before Our Eyes) answers those questions in this, his fourth and strongest book of verse, with a dizzying mix of abstractions, urban details and nuggets of historical fact. (FSG will republish Joseph's first three books in September as Codes, Precepts and Taboos.) "The two things that are interesting," Lawrence muses, "are history and grammar," envisioning both as "wild and fragile." At times his verse focuses squarely on politics: "What let's say twelve years from now," he asks, "will the zone of suffering that exists/ outside the established orders look like?" In another poem, "The state of the physical world," finally, "depends on shifts in the delusional thinking/ of very small groups." The same poem brings in images from Revelations ("the seven-headed beast from the sea"), from Ground Zero, from factory life, from a photographic still life and from the hard life of the poet's immigrant father. Joseph's "dream technique" of juxtapositions and exclamations derives from the late style of Robert Lowell, from whom he also takes one of his titles, updating Lowell's Vietnam-era frustrations for the era of smart bombs and globalization.
