La Far (Iowa Poetry Prize) - Softcover

Linsker, Eric

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1609382412 ISBN 13: 9781609382414

Publisher: University Of Iowa Press, 2014

Synopsis

How far are we from the Lake District? How far from the garden? Eric Linsker’s first book scrolls down the Anthropocene, tracking our passage through a technophilic pastoral where work and play are both forms of making others suffer in order to exist. In La Far, the world is faraway near, a hell conveniently elsewhere in which workers bundle Foxconn’s “rare earths” into the “frosty kits” that return us our content, but also the sea meeting land as it always has. Both are singable conditions and lead, irreversibly, to odes equally comfortable with praise and lament. The poems in La Far hope that by making the abstract concrete and the concrete abstract, “literalizing / a nightingale beyond / knowledge,” we might construct what Wordsworth called a “Common Day,” a communized life partaken of by all.

About this title

About the Author:

Eric Linsker holds degrees from Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, Chicago Review, Conjunctions, and Lana Turner. He lives in Brooklyn, where he coedits The Claudius App with Jeff Nagy and teaches at CUNY.

Review:

“Linsker’s poems splice and complicate realms and modes and sensory domains with wit and acute musical edgework. They are deeply, quixotically enjoined in the hard and essential ‘grief of eternal joy.’”―Emily Wilson, judge, 2013 Iowa Poetry Prize

“Eric Linsker knows that poetry has an unavoidable politics, that there is no way it can be otherwise. And yet he also knows that poetry’s powers often come from glancing at the huge, such as the deaths that resulted from the protests around the building of the power plant in Dongzhou, and yet in the next moment wandering away to notice something quiet about sparrows, something about how they peck at frozen water. So he has written La Far, a book that dwells in muted devotion, that resonates from a willingness to wander both toward and away, often at the same time.”―Juliana Spahr

“This book thinks the open, enlivened by material urgency, met in verse sounded through the long Western romantic torrent of enclosure, verdure, slaughter and soul. How its honeyed years are built in other’s blood. Open against privation’s time. Open into an earth made of anguish named a ‘garden.’ Thus to open heaven, to open like a broken heart is open―open out.”―Dana Ward

"Linsker's poems examine the world's movement, language and identity in the internet era with a craft that is original and unnerving." (Publishers Weekly)

"La Far stands as a lasting poetic landmark." (Connor Fisher 32poems.com 2015-06-12)

"One of the most vise-like poems I have ever encountered is 'We're So Social Now.'... You need to read the whole poem to understand how its grip works... In six pages of glitch, you will construct a kind of social coherence; you'll 'gang narrate,' as Linsker might say. While the poem shows sense-making at its most basic, it also (and I think this is the real achievement), enacts the web's peculiar sociality of nearing farness and far nearness. The poem has something of the cover photograph's uncanniness, its sense of wireless intimacy mingled with the impersonal solipsism of the screen-grab. To look is to flatten one world against another. And against her gesture—keep your distance—I keep looking." (Callie Garnett Public Books 2014-04-17)

About this edition

• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1609382412
• ISBN 13: 9781609382414
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 114