The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
At the heart of Joshua Weiner’s new book is an extended poem with a bold political dimension and great intellectual ambition. It fuses the poet’s point of view with Walt Whitman’s to narrate a decentered time-traveling collage about Rock Creek, a tributary of the Potomac that runs through Washington, DC. For Weiner, Rock Creek is the location of myriad kinds of movement, streaming, and joining: personal enterprise and financial capital; national politics, murder, sex, and homelessness; the Civil War and collective history; music, spiritual awakening, personal memory, and pastoral vision. The questions that arise from the opening foundational poem inform the others in the collection, which range widely from the dramatic arrival of an uncanny charismatic totem that titles the volume to intimate reflections on family, illness, and dream visions. The virtues of Weiner’s earlier books—discursive intelligence, formal control, an eccentric and intriguing ear, and a wide-ranging curiosity matched to variety of feeling—are all present here. But in The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish, Weiner has discovered a new poetic idiom, one that is stripped down, rhythmically jagged, and comprehensively philosophical about human limits.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Weiner's third book, a gathering of short poems bookended by two long lyric poems, explores how consciousness can be consumed by war, illness, and work. The first is a Whitmanesque meditation on Washington, D.C.'s Rock Creek that brings together disparate events and objects in one undulating form ("Thirty-three miles it meanders, heavy/ metals, phosphorus, chlorides, fertilizer" meets "the population of the army/ bedded in the makeshift wards/ is more numerous than the whole/ of Washington"); the second, "Cyclops," is an ambitious sequence indebted to the act of seeing and being seen, to private loss and public cognizance, and to events and images from Abu Ghraib, excerpting testimony from the war on terror's detainees. "Do you wish// to be something/ that you are not / shut your eye," he writes. The middle section contains tight, shorter pieces, including the title poem, which begins, "is not a man being swallowed by a fish/ with eyes like eight-point throwing stars/ it's a man being swallowed by a war/ a man being taken into the mouth of a woman/ or being swallowed by his work." Weiner, in cataloguing what "the pastoral cannot contain," uncovers the sharpest lyrics in this masterful book, at once poised and relentless.
