New Time

A collection of poetry from one of the foremost American avant-garde poets, the award-winning author of Way.

"Scalapino has proven to be one of experimental poetry's most successful genre-crossers, reducing narrative to its component agents and verbs and fusing them with epistemological investigations." —Publishers Weekly

Time spent in Japan, and everyday life in Berkeley and Oakland, come together as a kaleidoscope of words and consciousness in New Time. Leslie Scalapino pushes at the edges / spatial shape of language and experience in her new collection by writing that is itself events, which are to "punch a hole in reality."

Real events, occurring in real time, are transformed in the act of writing them as perceived rather than interpreted. Phrases repeat, conjoin, break apart, and return in this challenging and innovative work, as Scalapino moves toward a "new time" wherein there is no "inner" — one's illusion that is "the adamant social being / is inner" and "the body is a new form."

"Great writers—Blake, Whitman, Dickenson, Joyce, Stein, Zukofsky, Ginsberg, Keruac, even Pound—re-envision the present. . . . In our time, New Time, it is Leslie Scalapino who most fully articulates the constantly changing meaning(s) of now. This crystalline epic may be Scalapino's most "accessible" book yet, but its surfaces perpetually peel back to reveal a further that could never have existed before, nor in any other way." —Ron Silliman