Guests of Space - Softcover

Hollo, Anselm

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1566891922 ISBN 13: 9781566891929

Publisher: Coffee House Press, 2007

Synopsis

Anselm Hollo hangs his poetic hat upon the sonnet, graciously inviting us into his conversation with poets and thinkers, both here and gone, on subjects that range from environmentalism to the WTO protests, from wars waged in Kosovo and Iraq to questions of creativity and mortality.

With trademark wit, acumen, and charm, Hollo’s contribution to this multigenerational, international choir is one of the most important and enjoyable in contemporary letters.

Andrei Codrescu has said he awaits Hollo’s new poems “with more eagerness than those of any other living poet,” and Library Journal urges us not to “miss anything at all by this strong poet.”

About this title

About the Author

Anselm Hollo is the author of more than forty books and an award-winning translator. Born in Helsinki, Finland, Hollo has lived in the United States for thirty-seven years and now teaches at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. His most recent collection of poems, Notes on the Possibilities and Attractions of Existence, received the San Francisco Poetry Center Award.

Reviews

Cult poet and translator Hollo (Notes on the Possibilities and Attractions of Existence, 2001) makes this 32nd collection of his own verse an entertaining, chatty, omnivorous affair. Most of the volume consists of unrhymed 14-line sonnetlike poems packed with musings on life in general and on Hollo's daily experience. Sometimes the sonnets play with typography and layout, and often they incorporate quotations—from friends, from respected modern poets or poet-friends. Fans of the late Ted Berrigan will recognize this modus operandi as Berrigan's own, and Hollo's capacious sequences—which refer to Berrigan by name—sometimes read like a rambling homage to Berrigan's principles of composition: "It has to do with the minutely sensational,/ Says I, with what's little enough but enough." Hollo makes the most of the leaps and emotional spaces that separate his observations: his "trembling fringe of cryptonyms" resolves into many likable self-portraits, even if "every decoding's another encoding." Antiwar sonnets both shock and delight, decrying the latest fight between "The Short-Sighted Corporate Greed Heads/ & The Nothing-to-Lose Religious Fanatics." If the book as a whole seems overlong or talky, that may be a small price to pay for so many sharp lines, delivered with such aplomb. (Feb.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1566891922
• ISBN 13: 9781566891929
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 83