The Places by Matt Turner
This book is personal without performativity, political without pedantry, both subversive and subtle. Once you pick it up, you won’t put it down. —Eleanor Goodman
This book is personal without performativity, political without pedantry, both subversive and subtle. Once you pick it up, you won’t put it down. —Eleanor Goodman
This book is personal without performativity, political without pedantry, both subversive and subtle. Once you pick it up, you won’t put it down. —Eleanor Goodman
Pick up this book if you want a taste of darkness with a dark humor that speaks to our time. If you want intelligence that does not sell itself cheap. If you want a gimlet eye trained mercilessly on its targets. If you want a voice that will carry you on a journey and return you unharmed but changed. These poems traverse cities, inner worlds, and word shapes from megabank to 大跃. There are genuine surprises to be found here—a rare commodity— along with a rejection of the commodification of everything. This book is personal without performativity, political without pedantry, both subversive and subtle. Once you pick it up, you won’t put it down.
—Eleanor Goodman, translator of Zheng Xiaoqiong's In the Roar of the Machine
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This collection can be considered a lost guide to the great cities of New York-New Jersey and Beijing. Unlike the work of his contemporaries, Turner is more Baudelairean flâneur––stranger in the metropolis, where everything––supermarkets, banks, streets, cafés––is both familiar and out of place:
Hello, Dr Death
the city in the child is never born
the question inside
is the dynamic life of its image
it loops around the
fiberoptic cable of the city
Almost in the manner of a sketch he recreates his world of bustling, desert-like cities––distant, bewildered, bitter, rejected, and unapproachable––each line evoking startling images in the mind. His search for unanswerable answers preserves a unique and original voice:
the life of its life is practice, practice, practice
one life superimposed over another
—Wang Yin, author of A Summer Day in the Company of Ghosts
*
Matt Turner’s precise, concise, elegant poems are filled with flashes of clear vision and yet they are also reticent, withholding explanation in order to foreground the sensation of just looking, just being. The Places is about losing or—which is the same—finding yourself in a modern city, an endless city and an alien one, but of an estrangement that we make a home in. The city is Beijing; it is presented as an anywhere, an abstraction incarnated in concrete. We move through it like the point-of-view in the urban montage scenes of new wave films, black and white and shot from strange angles. Our being is being alone in the company of many.
—Eugene Ostashevsky, author of The Feeling Sonnets
Matt Turner is the author of several books of poetry. He lives in New York City.
Book Information:
· Paperback: 100 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-493-2
$18
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