Metropole
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s third collection opens with a set of lyric experiments whose music and mutable syntax explore the social relations concealed in material things. O’Brien’s poems measure the "vague cadence" of daily life, testing both the value and limits of art in a time of vanishing publics and permanent war. The long title poem, written in a strict iambic prose, charts the disappearance of the poetic into the prosaic, of meter into the mundane, while reactivating the very possibilities it mourns: O’Brien’s prosody invests the prose of things with the intensities of verse. In the charged space of this hybrid form, objects become subjects and sense pivots mid-sentence into song: "The sun revolves around the earth revolves around the sun."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This third collection of ambitious and highly self-conscious poems by O'Brien (Green and Gray) insists that mass culture and commerce have drained words of their meanings, while the poems are simultaneously unwilling to let those meanings go. Short and longer lyrics ranging from a quarter page to several pages, mostly set in unbroken columns flaunt self-mocking titles like "Poem with No Good Lines" and "To Be Read in Either Direction"; the former is actually a very long collection of pretty good lines, though no two of them seem to be from the same poem ("Her neck in profile and the top of the head/ The most fluent and honest I've felt in a year") while the latter narrates "a certain struggle one might have" with oneself, which indeed has no beginning or end. Taken together, these poems trap the reader in a tense argument with language and the self, which feels "a combination of things,/ essentially all of them, gone." The short poems form a prelude to the long title piece that makes up the book's final third, a sprawling, disjunctive meditation on contemporary urban and Internet-inflected life, in which, "Seen from above the private life looks like a dot." If O'Brien's poems are becoming increasingly resistant to, if not combative with, their readers, their rewards are also growing richer for readers willing to engage in the poems' arguments.
