From the Book of Giants
ISBN: 9780226890517
Platform/Publisher: Ebook Central / University of Chicago Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Limited; Download: 7 Days at a Time
Subjects: Literature;

The most powerful poems in Weiner's second collection combine narrative and lyric elements and range across subjects and kinds of speech, as in an account of a son's baseball game on the White House lawn that somehow connects the dots between Pol Pot, Cal Ripken, our current president and the Wild Cherry refrain "play that funky music, white boy... till you die." A later long poem riffs on Berkeley in the '90s and intertwines the stories of a local "life-artist" called the Polka Dot Man and an overzealous activist killed by an overzealous cop. These poems aren't political in any easy way, but have politics, memory and language at their center in a manner that recalls former poet laureate Robert Hass's work. When the lines aren't tensed enough, or when Weiner (The World's Room, 2001) loses himself in reverie without pitting reason against it, the poems can edge toward clich?. But these moments are relatively few Weiner's formal and lyric gifts both soothe and shock in these poems. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Joshua Weiner ,winner of a Whiting Writers' Award and a Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, is assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland and the author of The World's Room, also published by the University of Chicago Press. He lives in Washington, D.C.

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