Prior - Softcover

Berger, James

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1609641310 ISBN 13: 9781609641313

Publisher: BlazeVOX [books], 2013

Synopsis

There is an ever-present intensity to James Berger’s Prior through which the reader plummets. Full of complex and particular insight, by turns darkly comic and comically dark, these poems are as unafraid of regret and anger as they are of quick surprise and happiness. Prior testifies to what it means to be ankle deep in a new century, one marked by sound and fury and the astonishment that words still hold us fast to what is yet to come. Berger is a poet for this, our only, right now. — Richard Deming With Prior, Jim Berger offers up exuberantly dark and witty meditations on the past, marriage, love, maturity, projects, protecting one’s children, cultural amnesia, violence, kindness, and the impossibility of the present moment. These poems lean into the future and reach back to prior orders of suffering and loss, swinging wildly between disillusion and hope. They give us a sense of the fierceness of being alive, and the sheer gift of being able to reflect on what that means. They remind us, beautifully, of our brevity in this world. —Joanna Klink

About this title

About the Author:

James Berger lives in New Haven CT. He is a Senior Lecturer at Yale–where he does not lecture. He teaches seminars on how language, in the proper solution, dissolves, or else reincorporates into unrecognizable, engulfing signals disguised as pieces of the world. He also plays euphonium and valve trombone; the slide locks his brain. He is father to two young daughters and is married to the historian, Jennifer Klein. He is author of After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse (University of Minnesota Press, 1999) and the forthcoming The Disarticulate: Language, Impairment, and the Narratives of Modernity (New York University Press); and is editor of Helen Keller’s The Story of My Life: The Restored Edition (Random House, 2003). You should read all his books, but especially the unwritten ones–of which this book is an inversion.

About this edition

• Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1609641310
• ISBN 13: 9781609641313
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 120