Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos: Poems 1973-1993 - Softcover

Joseph, Lawrence

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374125171 ISBN 13: 9780374125172

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005

Synopsis

The first three books by the author of Into It

Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos brings together the poems from Lawrence Joseph's first three books of poetry: Shouting at No One, Curriculum Vitae, and Before Our Eyes. Now in one volume, the poems from these three books can be seen as the work of one of American poetry's most original and challenging poets.

About this title

About the Author

Lawrence Joseph's fourth book of poems, Into It, was published by FSG in hardcover in September 2005. He lives in downtown Manhattan and is a professor of law at St. John's University School of Law.

From Booklist

Joseph is an attorney as well as a poet, which accounts for the legal tone of the title of his retrospective collection, Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos. Joseph also has a penchant for reasoning, yet these are molten works, and reading through his earlier poems is to journey through his poetic and philosophical development. Beneath the stable crust of memory is a search for identity. Joseph delves into his ancestry by considering his Lebanese and Syrian Catholic grandparents' homelands and history, and their place as Arab emigrants in the U.S. Through reflection on this heritage and the violence of his Detroit childhood, Joseph ponders anger, choice, and fate. Into It, which collects his newest work, reveals a different poetic voice, one that is more abstract and fluid. Here Joseph is less narrative-based and more symbolic, less angry and more disillusioned, less personal and more universal. Many lyrics seem "coded" with essayistic digressions that gracefully intertwine question, observation, and emotion. Being a New Yorker in a 9/11 world has certainly resonated with Joseph, and the melancholy, grief, and hope of so many people coming to grips with large-scale violence is palpable. Many of these poems are deftly painted (perhaps an influence from his painter wife) with feeling as brushstroke, judgment as perspective, language as dimension, metaphor as theme. Janet St. John
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Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0374125171
• ISBN 13: 9780374125172
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192