Deep Code (City Lights Spotlight, 12)

Combining a bent lyric perception with a fragmentation redolent of French cubism, Coletti portrays contemporary urban experience, from power relations and personal loss to nights among city dwellers recording their convivial distress, glad and dissolute at once. Part teddy bear fleeing the cultish outlines of the American northwest, part Apollinaire in Brooklyn, Coletti culls his materials from the ether and assembles them into resonant structures at once intensely personal and strangely universal—a little outrageous—both confusingly lovely and apt in their ungainliness. Lines like "I'm nearly home is what everyone says" and "triceratops & the bad glue / that made us good friends," only begin to demonstrate the astute linguistic eye and deft line break sense of John Coletti.

Praise for Deep Code:

"A sonic surrealist typewriter clacks in rhythm across Colletti's brow. Read it in his sweet-eye glance: poetry grams of tender touch. Tuff cookie meat! & mystery. Shit is electric wire awesome stuff."––Thurston Moore

"In Deep Code, we walk hand-in-hand with a street smart and tenderhearted city boy who, wanting “ALLLLLLL the experience”, is immersed and so immerses the reader in contemporary cacophonies where “things collide” at a pace both expansive and measured. John Coletti expertly props our ears to what’s striking and dare I say beautiful in the terrifying realities of this world. This book is “at ease / with not being at ease” and that, for me, is a guidepost. Reading Deep Code is like eating some kind of perfected pop rocks—all the colorful action, and just as true, but without the saccharine hangover."—Alli Warren

“Deep code is a theory of expressive subterfuge performed as piecemeal continuities. Its poems are distressed & fine like all the chances we forget we’re free to make for one another, edged to mellow like the contours of a party felt in general & intimate perception."—Dana Ward

About the Author:

John Coletti is the author of the book Mum Halo (2010) and the chapbooks Same Enemy Rainbow (2008) and Physical Kind (2005). With Anselm Berrigan, he is the author of the limited edition Skasers (2012). He has served as editor of The Poetry Project Newsletter and co-edits Open 24 Hours Press. Other projects include a collaborative print with artist Kiki Smith, a chapbook collaboration with Shana Moulton, and a libretto for Excelsior, an opera composed by Caleb Burhans commissioned by Chicago's Fifth House Ensemble which premiered in 2013.

John Coletti is the author of the book Mum Halo (2010) and the chapbooks Same Enemy Rainbow (2008) and Physical Kind (2005). With Anselm Berrigan, he is the author of the limited edition Skasers (2012). As an undergraduate at Columbia University, he studied poetry with Kenneth Koch and Ron Padgett. He has served as editor of The Poetry Project Newsletter and co-edits Open 24 Hours Press with poet Greg Fuchs. Other projects include a collaborative print with artist Kiki Smith, a chapbook collaboration with Shana Moulton, and a libretto for Excelsior (Caught: The Wide Open), an opera composed by Caleb Burhans commissioned by Chicago’s Fifth House Ensemble and premiering in 2013.