Escape Velocity (First Edition)

A polyrhythmic and polyphonic "tour-de-force" that engages both with the constructed and the constructor--with buildings and architects, with music and musicians, policy and politics, the personal and the political, the dancer and the dance.

Attacking his subject matter with fierce precision, confronting the world on the same tough terms as an investigative journalist would, David Breskin traverses the globe in search of the conjunctions and elisions that reveal the world. His poems go into all the darkened interstitial spaces, and crack them and lever them wide apart: scary, open, free. "Welfare Reform" is about just that, as a monologue spoken from one very poor to one very rich, referencing North Korea, African tribal warfare, the holocaust, mortgages, ecstasy, Native Americans, tennis and dancing along the way; "Ugly Beauty" takes a Monk song title and goes at contemporary Social Darwinism by way of Cheney, Bush, "The Bell Curve" controversy, and Cindy Crawford's mole; "Newsworthy" looks at how our society commodifies "tragedy" to bolster the emotions of innocent spectators (with a special snippet reserved for Plath's ex-); and "Due Process" examines a schoolyard shooting from the POV of a mother who's lost her only child.

David Breskin first made his name in the 1980s and early ’90s as a freelance journalist, writing for national magazines, most prominently, Rolling Stone, where he was a contributing editor. After publishing a novel, The Real Life Diary of a Boomtown Girl, Breskin turned away from journalism and toward poetry, and by the mid-1990s had begun publishing poems in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Parnassus, New American Writing, and TriQuarterly, among other periodicals. His first book of poetry, Fresh Kills, was published in 1997, and his second, Escape Velocity, in 2004. His next work, Supermodel was a one-sentence epic poem, or novel-in-verse.

Breskin has also worked as a record producer for the past thirty-five years and, in addition to Frisell and Cline, has collaborated with leading-edge musicians beginning with John Zorn, Ronald Shannon Jackson, Vernon Reid, and Joey Baron in the ’80s and early ’90s, and continuing with Mary Halvorson, Kris Davis, Craig Taborn, and Chris Lightcap in the current decade. He lives in San Francisco. Most of his work may be found at davidbreskin.com.