Description
Similarly four complete poetry books and a selection of new poems and sequences-samples the ongoing project of C. S. Giscombe's long, long song of location and range. In all the work collected here, location is a practice; range is the fact of the serial, the figuring of continuous arrival.
The writing speaks to rivers, the souls of city life, animals, the counted and uncounted, the many instances that might indicate "a shape to all that sound," monstrosity and argument (the latter defined, with a hat-tip to Frankenstein, as "a thing that becomes terrifying to its maker"), and the colors of human migration, these things among others. In the "Cry Me a River" poem, Giscombe writes, "for the sake of argument, say that the shape of a region or of some distinct areas of a city could stand in for memory and that it-the shape is a specific value because it's apparent and public, and that way achieves an almost nameless contour."
The writing speaks to rivers, the souls of city life, animals, the counted and uncounted, the many instances that might indicate "a shape to all that sound," monstrosity and argument (the latter defined, with a hat-tip to Frankenstein, as "a thing that becomes terrifying to its maker"), and the colors of human migration, these things among others. In the "Cry Me a River" poem, Giscombe writes, "for the sake of argument, say that the shape of a region or of some distinct areas of a city could stand in for memory and that it-the shape is a specific value because it's apparent and public, and that way achieves an almost nameless contour."
Reviews / Votes
From upstate New York to downstate Illinois to the western coast of Canada, Giscombe maps the back roads and rarely seen landscapes in places where Miami means a hometown river and Lakeshore means a long-distance train. These intricate and impressive poems create spaces for readers to hear that 'sizzle between the alliances' of poetry, race, geography, and history. An important new collection, and a must-have book for your shelves. -- Mark Nowak Giscombe's Prairie Style . . . creates moments of coherence, but also welcomes moments of dissonance, when the expository eloquence of sentences and paragraphs just falls apart. -- Robert Archambeau * The Volta * Here is a powerful, understated meditation on place, ancestry, and time.More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Normal, IL
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Dimensions
Height: 215 mm
Width: 139 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-62897-437-9 (9781628974379)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
C. S. Giscombe is a poet, essayist, and professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. His poetry books include Prairie Style, Two Sections From Practical Geography, Giscome Road, Here, At Large, and Postcards. Giscombe carried a childhood fascination with trains into adulthood, and his work often features railroads: how they shape landscapes and in particular how they formulate "natural boundaries" between neighborhoods. Born and raised on the West Side of Dayton, Ohio, Giscombe recalls in an interview with fellow writer Mark Nowak how the trains and tracks "brush up against people's houses over here in black Dayton more than anywhere else in town." Though occasionally esoteric, Giscombe's work is successful in its ability to formulate unions, reflecting the interconnectedness of language, race, and familial bonds. In addition to being a prolific storyteller, Giscombe is a long-distance cyclist.