homemade traps for new world Brians
These are poems for our new millennium. Evan Willner explores
the state, or rather the states, we are in, with fifty poems of
remarkable linguistic power. These little “traps”
or contraptions of 145 syllables each, take up big issues of our
time—the challenge of seeing the self from the angle of
the cell; the mechanization of bodies and minds; the violence
that accompanies and defeats our procreative urge—and turns
them into units of poetic energy. Enjambments, apostrophes, interrogatives
pull us in. Words squeeze, ooze, protrude and collide like the
mind-body entities, those brains and brain-emissions they describe.
The poems wreak havoc on everyday language and associations in
order to regenerate them. And if they shock us and amuse us by
turns, they always please.
Bonnie Costello, author of Shifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape
in Modern American Poetry and Marianne Moore: Imaginary
Possessions.
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Evan Willner reinvisions fifty states as fifty poems that each
have the flinty, hard logic and formal density of stone slabs—stele
or gravestones—or of teeth. And yet, the language within
these poems is palpable and mysterious and alive, the connection
between words and things skew in all sorts of right ways that
end up making everything seem to be wriggling and formicating
on the same level of consciousness: next time you look at nature,
don’t be surprised if it gives you a come-hither look back.
A must read for all Brians.
Brian Evenson, author of The Open Curtain and The
Wavering Knife: Stories.
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Strange things are going on in the dark woods, and Evan Willner
has noted them all down – tree trunks, sticks, bones, rocks,
jerky turning neighbors, cereal ding dongs and diapers and odd
flying things – noted them down in grammatically elegant
sentences that marry complex literary processes with the muddy
matter of our world and turn them into – bingo! –
poetry.
John Tranter, author of Urban Myths: 210 Poems: New and Selected
and The Floor of Heaven and editor of Jacket
magazine.
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Relentless and pessimistic, Evan Willner’s poems track the
blurry line between metaphor and metastasis, exploring the dark
underside of creativity with intellectual rigor and dark humor.
Part phenomenology and part phrenology – these poems constantly
“rak[e] [their] hands” along the world’s surfaces
to find its “packed dumb families” – homemade
traps for new world Brians explores the ethical dilemmas inherent
in the act of creation. The drama of these poems exists at an
almost cellular level – each homunculus a new rejection
of the synthesis of subject and object, each poem straining against
its formal limitations. Willner’s work is difficult, metamorphic,
offering itself as an answer to the philosophical questions it
poses. Why, in the end, do we create life or art? “So, we
can,/when birds flap and bubble, believe that it’s us they
mean.”
Spencer Short, author of tremolo. Winner of the National
Poetry Series award.
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Scary, abrasive, absorbing poems. Like outer planets orbiting
what were once sonnets, and with a syntax that at times seems
to be a differential science.
Aaron Fogel, author of The Printer’s Error.
Book Information:
· Paperback: 66 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] (March 2007)
· ISBN: 1-934289-44-2
$14
