The Unfinished: Books I-VI by Mark DuCharme

The Unfinished is constituted by movement and desire, by speaking that unsays itself: by knowing, if only provisionally, that the “energy is in the body/Blooming when we speak.” Not a bloom, but a blooming: this ambitious book unfolds and unfolds through the dual actions of pursuit and escape (“Is meaning embedded in fleeing?”). For here, to be finished would be dishonest to the Real. So The Unfinished is a veritable catalogue of deliberately partial poetics and metaphysics which alternately affirm and balk in suspicion at world, history, or word.

Ghosts of experience occupy this poetry, placing pressure on logic until it morphs into the assertive speculations that force new logics. Moving through a startling range of tone and formal shape, The Unfinished erects its tower of Babel, keenly attuned to “What’s still not real, but missing.” Mark DuCharme acknowledges that living means being continually erased and yet he has the guts and grace to proceed anyway, “To piece the language shreds/ into a body.” His poetry enters our own breath, blooming.

—Elizabeth Robinson

Mark DuCharme's beautiful poems teach us to read all over again: mystery, the situation of person, the texture of dream and the texture of awareness: The Unfinished is a tough book, a necessary book.

—Joseph Lease

About Answer (BlazeVOX, 2011):

""DuCharme spins and alters the music of his lyrics in as varied a way as any lyric poet working at the moment, without ever losing their basic melodicism.... DuCharme is neither a writer of conventional lyric phrasing and imagery, nor of Stephen Burt-named New Thing minimalism, although his work sometimes veers in and out of both tendencies. The poems in Answer take more risks than most lyric poetry of the present day.""

—Mark Wallace

""Like Whitman, DuCharme might hear America singing; he might hear America marching, but what he’s particularly good at hearing is America gone off key and become unconsciously discouraged.... What he hears is America too put upon and embroiled in irrelevance to bother trying to say anything worthwhile at all, which is a bad thing in a society that is fueled by dissenting opinion.""

—Tom Hibbard, Galatea Resurrects

Book Information:

· Paperback: 214 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-140-5