The World in Place of Itself - Softcover

Rasmovicz, Bill

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1882295641 ISBN 13: 9781882295647

Publisher: Alice James Books, 2007

Synopsis

San Francisco, CA; Chicago, IL; Portland, ME; New York, NY; Wilkes-Barre, PA; Chattanooga, TN

About this title

About the Author

Bill Rasmovicz is a graduate of the MFA writing program at Vermont College and Temple University School of Pharmacy. His poetry has appeared in Mid-American Review, Nimrod, Hunger Mountain, Third Coast, and other magazines. He lives in New York City.

Reviews

This passionate debut from New York City–based Rasmovicz places him on an unfamiliar border, between the haunted generalities of Franz Wright and the hunted, bomb-damaged villages of Charles Simic. Rasmovicz's Polish heritage provides the collection's deep background; many poems depict the towns and fields of a wartime dream-state Eastern Europe—fear thumping the air like a fog light. Many of these poems find portents in crows, who represent both the history of warfare and the menace of our own personal deaths. What tethers us to consciousness? Rasmovicz asks, as if he would prefer never to have known. His scary landscapes, with their rivers, looted tabernacle, and perfume/ ...of a neighborhood burning, suggest a poet who cannot separate the tumult of political conflict from the half-light of heavy overcast in his own soul. Sometimes he lands too close to Simic, though he lacks (by far) the older poet's reserve. Rasmovicz is rarely a subtle, and often a melodramatic, writer (desire continues/ hauling the broken cello of its body forward). His music does not innovate—lines break on the phrase, some poems sound like speeches. And yet his images are vivid, the night of his soul dark on the page. (Sept.)
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From “On Becoming Light”:

And there it was, the moth;
a child’s hand wrestling itself in the grass.
Delirious, it fumbled its way out from the dark umbrella
of a tree, then landed on the stoop.

A frayed rope of light swung from the porch.
The moon was gorged on the dewy foment of summer.

I set my hand near, and it fluttered into my palm:
its weight no more than breath, its wings,
laments hammered into sheets of dust.

Edition details

• Publisher: Alice James Books
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1882295641
• ISBN 13: 9781882295647
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 80