Proxies
Essays Near Knowing
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Past compunction, expressly unbeholden, these twenty-four single-subject essays train focus on a startling miscellany of topics —Foot Washing, Dossiers, Br’er Rabbit, Housesitting, Man Roulette, the Locus Amoenus—that begin to unpack the essayist himself and his life’s rotating concerns: sex and sexuality, poetry and poetics, subject positions in American labor (not excluding academia), and his upbringing in working-class, Primitive Baptist, central-piedmont North Carolina.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The 25 essays in this collection from poet Blanchfield (A Several World) are small, highly polished jewels that together form an intricate mosaic. Giving himself the project of following a thought to its uncomfortable edges, in each entry Blanchfield picks a subject foot washing, authorship, owls and examines it from several angles until the connection between metaphysical principle and lived experience suddenly crystallizes, often producing an analogy as surprising as it is lovely. Blanchfield will typically betray a glimpse of erudition a reference to cult cinema, Greek tragedy, or Noam Chomsky alongside raw confession, balancing "a poetics of impersonality" with "disinhibited autobiography." Thus, the billiards term "leave" proves connected to his father's departure, a meditation on ing nues extends to his experience of 9/11, and the story of a dog bite becomes the story of his coming out. The themes of secrets and concealment pervade the collection, as does a "spellbound trade in vulnerability and openheartedness" conjured by Blanchfield's prose style, with its catch-and-release rhythm sometimes lyrical, sometimes barbed. The concluding essay "Correction," which fills in or corrects details for the other selections, offers its own tribute to the processes by which we construct meaning the real subject of this elegant and astonishing book.
