Music and Suicide : Poems
Author(s): Jeff Clark
The long-awaited second full-length collection from one of our most exciting poets.
Imagine if you will a pageant on a hill
and picture if you can a boy
designed to be impaled upon a stilt
and bleed for a panelist's joy
Jeff Clark's first collection, The Little Door Slides Back, was hailed as an unclassifiable classic in underground American writing: "A shadow world, seen by a visionary" (Rain Taxi); "a 120-page spell" (American Letters & Commentary); "a happy sadomasochism, a luxuriance of prurience" (Boston Review); "devoted to the idea of possibility in the poet who operates as free agent, looking to the weather not for the springs of dailiness but for some message from the aether" (Arras); "thick, purring music" (Rhizome).
In Music and Suicide, his second collection, Clark moves away from the sinisterism and mask-ridden black humor of his debut, into a present mazy with freed shadow, somatic magic, and post-suffocatory seeing.
Review(s):
“Rather than dramatizing a fixed relationship to the world, Clark's poems allow themselves to be pulled along by their unpredictable, discordant music: they're open to chance, private association, and "someone else's thinking." . . . Clark may be captivated by the highly charged, densely imaged realm we associate with Baudelaire and Rimbaud, but he knows when and how to subvert it . . . [He] attempts to recover and assess--rather than reject or ignore--the past and the beginnings of modernism by constructing a flaneur who is both terrified and bemused by the world he enters as "the little door slides back.” —John Yau, Boston Review on The Little Door Slides Back
ISBN: 9780374529598