Plummet - Softcover

Nealon, Christopher

4.61

28 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1890311294 ISBN 13: 9781890311292

Publisher: Edge Books, 2009

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Poetry. As with many books, description of Chris Nealon's latest, fails, yet in this case it also, unusually, falls. A few moments of demonstration rather than description: "nothing you read will help you now"; "I am not gay, I am from the future!"; "Classicism: build your buildings so that even conquering hordes will be like, No way." Plummet is a post-catastrophic work written largely before the current all-American, i.e. global, plunge--imagine a kind of clairvoyant O'Hara distracted by Adorno, and Bear Stearns. It's that pit of the stomach feeling, when plummeting one goes from high to low--that's that pit of the stomach feeling--in the pit, of the stomach. "Will there be sirens? Toxins? I imagine violence miming reconciliation and then back again." The Believer reporter Stephen Burt observed of his previous collection The Joyous Age that "Nealon's bracing and bitter debut both enters and mocks the tradition of kaleidoscopic, difficult poetry as grand social critique, and makes most new work in that mode sound sloppy or bland by contrast." In other words, as it says in this new collection "Lifted from the cadences you know and then let fall.

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From Publishers Weekly:

Internationally renowned as a scholar of modern poetry and gay and lesbian writing, Nealon is also a formidably intelligent, decidedly challenging poet. This sophomore effort (after The Joyous Age) tends to self-interrogation, self-mockery, and an almost desperate knowingness about every topic under Nealon's blistering sun—politics and political theory, sex, urban life, commerce, language itself. I am not gay, I am from the future! one page announces; Chase after the new, but remember people like it when you repeat yourself, another poem says. Like Joshua Clover (to whom the book is dedicated), Nealon can sound abrasive, tired beyond argument, worn out by his own sophistication, or else eager to encompass, mock, and surmount various trends: some poems apparently made by Google-sculpting (arranging results of Internet searches) may be too au courant to last. Yet Nealon's self-consciousness also provokes compellingly: Hold fast to your integrity until it becomes Art Song and you have no friends. The poems present, mull, and sometimes undercut the very presuppositions (that we can ever listen to one another; that we can know what makes us happy or sad) that let other poets write poems at all. Nealon sets himself apart from all convention, sounding comfortable nowhere: that discomfort, that sense of restless, fast inquiry, gives much of his new work its peculiar, dissonant force. (Dec.)
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