Alpha Ruins - Hardcover

Borkhuis, Charles; Brokuis, Charles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0838754422 ISBN 13: 9780838754429

Publisher: Bucknell Univ Pr, 2000

Synopsis

Alpha Ruins was written as a collection of poems of sensual abstraction that attempts to advance the perimeters of a post-modern critical-lyric. The project was to create poems that work in the gap between the analytical, social, and semiotic concerns of contemporary language writing and that of a more dream-like, mythic, existential awareness of the body as an ontological presence in the writing process.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

Picking up somewhere within the fifth section of the "Waste Land," Borkuis's poems pick through deserted contemporary landscapes where the dead and living intermingle with a chilling ease: "details drain/ little lights into people/ now and at the hour of our recycling/ rain grows upwards/ in trails of transparent veins/ that cool and cluster into floating cities." With an even tone reminiscent of Robert Duncan and Michael Palmer, though without their formally variety, the poems of this fourth collection insinuate themselves into the breathy alleys of the city, the between-moments of thinking, and the fissures of existence. At times, the poems move somewhat near William Gibson's hallucinogenic melancholy ("lost secrets live echoes/ particle-currents in the veins/ whispers while you write// peeling back the skin// or turning a page/ landscape with friends standing/ on a hill of yellow leaves"); at others they actively recall the high surrealist tradition, drenched in urban phantasmagoria. The surreal tone is most effective when anchored by recognizable imagery from contemporary life and moments of humor, as in the dark but playful "Slice of Life": "to open the cover of a book to find/ a miniature author inside/ asleep in his coffin/ dressed as a ghost/ carries a rubber hatchet." With the rise of neo-noir stylistics and cyber culture in film and science fiction, not to mention in everyday life, Borkhuis's poems may have finally found their moment. (Nov.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

Acquired Characteristics
Alpha Ruins
Blank Page Already Black
Close Up And Far Away
Code Heroes
Deader Than Dead
Dream Of The Everyday World
Empty When We Look
Eye To Eye
Farther
Fractal Geometry
The French Disease
The Gaze
Glass River Divide
Hauling Light Home In A Box
Intimacy
Little Numbers
Marginalia
The Mirror And Its Double
Nobody
On The Periphery
Orpheus Dividing
Pebbles In The Mouth
The Rapture
Second Sight
Severed Moon
Sight Lines
Slice Of Life
State Of Mind
The Surgeon's Glove
That
Touch My Money And Leave
Transparencies
Write What I Say
-- Table of Poems from Poem FinderŪ

About this edition

• Publisher: Bucknell Univ Pr
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0838754422
• ISBN 13: 9780838754429
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 107