it was today - Softcover

Codrescu, Andrei

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1566891469 ISBN 13: 9781566891462

Publisher: Coffee House Press, 2003

Synopsis

In praise of his poetry, The New York Times calls Andrei Codrescu "one of our most prodigiously talented and magical writers." Part genius, part tongue-in-cheek provocateur, Codrescu is an audacious and passionate poet. The heart of this first new collection in nearly a decade is a beautiful conceit containing the "recently discovered" correspondence between a warrior and a courtesan in fourteenth-century China. These tender, timeless verses contrast nicely with tough, funny -poems about modern life and millennial malaise.

Andrei Codrescu is a celebrated poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and commentator on National Public -Radio. A World Heavyweight Champion Poet, his many awards include the Literature Prize of the Romanian Cultural Foundation and the Peabody Award for his film Road Scholar. Born in Romania, Andrei Codrescu lives in New Orleans.

About this title

About the Author

Writer and NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu was working on a film exploring life along the Mississippi, when Katrina slammed into his hometown. After hosting scores of refugees in his Baton Rouge home, Codrescu released his essay collection New Orleans Mon Amour, becoming one of the many important voices celebrating New Orleans culture, recording its devastation, and awakening America's conscience.

From Publishers Weekly

Codrescu, certainly not unknown as a poet, and widely recognizable as a cranky cultural commisar on public radio, has written a book that is valuable in the way that, say, Pete Townshend's solo records were, as crafty expressions of a guy whose more radical (druggy, horny, vagrant, political) days are behind him, but whose pop and zing has been mellowed not with age so much as the bodily memory (tobaccoey fingers, shattered tear ducts) of having seen more than most. His "to a young poet" is as myopic as it is aptly ventriloquistic: "& then if you publish a big/ book of poems I'll read/ one or two & give you my/ begrudging approval in the name/ of the new flock even though/ we are lost & nobody cares/ if we live or we die." His light formal touch includes almost exclusive use of lower-case letters and very little punctuation, providing a limpidity that allows the poet to dart from style to style and length to length. Some of these poems seem slight, but none lack the contrapuntal effects and occluded phrases of dialectical thinking; every poem has a beginning statement, a middle where it is countered and worked through, and an end that turns the tables on it all in a winning, often wittily poignant way: "now we are here what should we / do with our accents // do like me I say / keep talking."
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1566891469
• ISBN 13: 9781566891462
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160