Discography
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
This year’s winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Sean Singer’s Discography. Playful, experimental, jazz-influenced, the poems in this book delight in sound and approach the more abstract pleasures of music. Singer takes as his subjects music, jazz figures, and historical events. Series judge W. S. Merwin praises Singer for his “roving demands on his language” and “the quick-changes of his invention in search of some provisional rightness.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This year's Yale Younger Poet is a young man with a record collection. In Sean Singer's Discography, aggressively up-to-date techniques (some of which suggest Mark Levine or Dean Young) evoke and analyze Afro-American music from early blues recordings ("My hair is black and glossy but I am not Bessie Smith") to John Coltrane. In Singer's two-part ode to a piano, "Eternity begins with springs, hammers & felt." Other sides of this thematically varied collection examine a character named, punningly, "Singer," or take up the poet's own sentiments (including guilt) about his Jewish identity: one highlight (singled out by judge W. S. Merwin) is a "Poem with Groucho Marx Refrains."
