Excitement Tax (Punchy Poetry) - Softcover

Vincent, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 192759944X ISBN 13: 9781927599440

Publisher: DC Books, 2017

Synopsis

Dara Wier has written about Cheshirization: "In nine poems whose tones, tempers, tonics and contents exquisitely mesh, John Emil Vincent carries on an extended conversation with any one of us who wishes to take up where what's proposed poem by poem takes off into heretofore unexplored zones of our own. We frame what's next as each new poem frames its contents in elegantly surprising, slightly raucous configurations." His previous books are critical. His first book, Queer Lyrics, was chosen as a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title. Kevin Kopelson of The University of Iowa has the following to say about the book: "Poetry lovers should be writing love poems to John Emil Vincent and not just queer ones. For he has done something very difficult and completely necessary: performed both formalist and thematic analyses of deliberately difficult modern poetry with a view to considering connections between sexual identity and poetic closure. Even readers with an aversion to such poetry will find themselves taken gently by the hand and led through this forbidding terrain by an unusually considerate yet formidably erudite critic. Let's hope this isn't Vincent s final word on the subject." It wasn't his last word on the subject. Vincent s second book is John Ashbery and You. His later books approaches Ashbery's recent, difficult, critically neglected poetry with an eye to the pronoun 'you' and an ear to the construction of Ashbery's oeuvre in the form of discrete book projects. Susan M. Schultz of the University of Hawaii writes: "Vincent is a wonderful guide to Ashbery's work; he has read the books over and again, and his own style often resembles Ashbery's, ranging from high academic discourse to slang, from poetic to prosaic diction. This is an ambitious work, moving as it does in several directions, and it is eminently readable." His most recent critical book is an edited collection of essays about the poet Jack Spicer, entitled After Spicer. Jay Parini, Axinn Professor of English at Middlebury College says: "After Spicer is an important collection of essays on a figure of increasing interest to all readers of American poetry. Vincent has gathered a range of (mostly) young and certainly vibrant thinkers, almost all of them poets themselves, as well as critics. I found myself stimulated at every turn, glad to have read this work, and newly interested in the poetry of Spicer." And Brian Reed at University of Washington writes: "After Spicer is a first-class introduction to one of the premier American poets of the mid-twentieth century. It covers everything from detective fiction to his gay rights activism. Afterward you will know why so many of today s poets consider him an indispensable precursor." Excitement Tax is Vincent s first book of poetry.

About this title

About the Author

John Emil Vincent is a Montreal-based poet, editor, and archivist. He s taught literature, queer theory, and poetry writing at Concordia and Queen s in Canada and at Wesleyan, Haverford, and University of Miami in the US. He and his partner, Luis Loya Garcia, emigrated to Montreal in 2010 to get married and escape anti-immigrant laws and sentiment in the US. Vincent earned his BA in Religion and Literary Studies (French) from Williams College where he worked with Louise Glück. We went on to earn an MFA from Warren Wilson College (in North Carolina) where he worked with Heather McHugh and Larry Levis among others. Toward the end of his MFA he started his PhD in English across the state at Duke University where he studied under Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Michael Moon. He was among the earliest cohort to graduate specializing in Queer Theory. While at Duke he published an essay on Swinburne and whipping in Eve's collection Novel Gazing and co-authored an article on Latinamericanism and My Own Private Idaho with José Estaban Muñoz. He recently earned his Masters Degree in Library Science (Archives) from Simmons College (in Boston). He has worked doing preservation work for John Ashbery in his home in Hudson, New York, and has worked helping organize James Tate's papers and books after his recent death. He served as Editor-at-Large for the Massachusetts Review, where he edited a double especially queer issue packed with queer literary luminaries and a special issue celebrating the 50th anniversary of the UMass-Amherst Program for Poets and Writers. He's served as poetry editor for the now-defunct Swink magazine and issue editor for tinywords (a web-based haiku journal). He has published poems in jubilat, Denver Quarterly, BlazeVOX, Slope, Spork, failbetter, Drunkenboat, and many other journals. A number of his poems appeared in an anthology of new gay poets, entitled This New Breed, edited by Rudy Kikel (Windstorm Creative 2003). With Factory Hollow Press he recently published a chapbook Cheshirization containing 9 poems from Excitement Tax.

About this edition

• Publisher: DC Books
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 192759944X
• ISBN 13: 9781927599440
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 100