Daze (Salt Modern Poets Series) - Softcover

Cooperman, Matthew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1844712575 ISBN 13: 9781844712571

Publisher: Salt Pub, 2006

Synopsis

The poems of Daze form a prospect on time-the passing of literal days, the ephemerality of the body, frangible memory, American speed, the crisis of late modernity. Daze charts out the periods of our belief, blending personally-lived experiences with wildly assimilative narratives which make up our blurred identities. Written as a series of series, Daze works out the demands of the diurnal by interlocking poems both discretely within sections and across sections. Challenging the moral entropy of the 21st century, Daze is as much a view of bewilderment and outrage as it is the beautiful or true expression of poetry.

About this title

About the Author:

Matthew Cooperman was born in New Haven, CT in 1964. He is author of two chapbooks, Words About James (Phylum Press, 2006) and Surge (Kent State University, 1999) as well as the full-length collection A Sacrificial Zinc, which won the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize (Pleiades/LSU, 2001). He currently lives in Fort Collins, CO, where he teaches at Colorado State University.

Review:

While `Daze' delivers numerous interlocking forms and inventive substructures, it is at its most engaging when it allows one to simply stumble upon them... Such is the case with the serial poem "Channel Town", which begins with what seems to be an innocuous narrative that quickly breaks down and reforms as one progresses through its seven pages... Cooperman's sequence uses the detritus of reportage to show the mutability of language, of narrative and event, and therefore the ease with which such things can be recast as fodder for any kind of argument or action... That the poem works outside of the confines of such a reading, which is to say that it's as aesthetically interesting as it is ethically engaging, is tantamount to the success of the book as a whole. One moves through the unexpected corridors of `Daze' not to derange the senses but to sense the world's derangement - the first and indeed most difficult step toward change. -- Noah Eli Gordon

About this edition

• Publisher: Salt Pub
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1844712575
• ISBN 13: 9781844712571
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 108