You Are the Phenomenology
ISBN: 9781613765920
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / University of Massachusetts Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Experimental poetry American; Experimental literature American;

You Are the Phenomenology is a cross-genre book--a blend of poetry, songs, lyric prose, and invented forms--that explores the everyday junctures of perception, compassion, and multiplicity. How might our powers of association create shared experiences without distorting the contexts from which those experiences emerge?

One of the volume's innovative forms is a poetic series called "Quadrilaterals"--four-line poems that present the reader with various ways to leap associative gaps:

Quadrilateral : Pinch in Your Heel

Soars the mackled sound, kites ago :
A Polish boy thinks with accordions, adopts a stammer :
When were we first older than we wanted to be :
That was our city, our chisel, the corbeil from which we ate.

Timothy O'Keefe is the author of The Goodbye Town, winner of the 2010 FIELD Poetry Prize, and his poems have appeared in a wide array of journals, including the American Poetry Review, Boston Review, and Colorado Review.

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