Paul Metcalf: Collected Works, Volume III, 1987-1997 - Hardcover

Metcalf, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1566890624 ISBN 13: 9781566890625

Publisher: Coffee House Press, 1997

Synopsis

This volume completes the collected works of an American genius that Coffee House has helped rediscover.

About this title

From Library Journal

It is an interstate highway, a backbone, the dividing line between sanity and schizophrenia, a place within which to collect endless pathologies, "not a poem, not a novel, not a history, not a journal, yet at times some or all of these." It is, in other words, the second volume of Metcalf's Collected Works (see LJ 11/15/96 for a review of the first installment), an odd, exhilarating hybrid of a text somehow "based" on Interstate 57. In his method, Metcalf reminds us that the world is endlessly interesting; whatever is gleaned, even the strange or banal, matters to a story largely taken up in the interstices. An epic may be constructed solely out of place names from the 1968 U.S. Postal Service Zip Code Directory ("Zip Odes"); 19th-century mustachioed actors and any number of other associations may connect the stories of Poe and John Wilkes Booth; volcanic eruptions, invasions, and attacks and counterattacks are fabulously juxtaposed to comprise the record of Martinique?all of it threatening to overcome any notion of a legitimate, received history. Metcalf's project has been solitary and glacial in its undertaking, but readers would be at a serious deficit without it.?Steven R. Ellis, Pennsylvania State Univ. Libs., University Park
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

Huascaran
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Edition details

• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 1566890624
• ISBN 13: 9781566890625
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 600