Geoffrey G. O'Brien - Böcker

Geoffrey G. O'Brien's second collection documents the "remorse of the senses" that attends each moment of experience, the pain and pleasure of not exiting a world in which injustice and distraction secure every sensual event. Attempting to reestablish experience as something other than complicity, these poems insist on "desiring that which is as if it were not," making poetry out of neighborhood flyers, the Patriot Act, and the poverty of presidential speech. Given this mandate to stay within limited resources, Green and Gray makes a virtue of refusing to abandon them, often relying on an emphatic recirculation of words and phrases to generate its own system complexities. These are poems whose materials remember their former use: the gray of the city and the green it used to be.

Geoffrey G. O'Brien's third collection opens with a set of lyric experiments whose music and mutable syntax explore the social relations concealed in material things. O'Brien's poems measure the 'vague cadence' of daily life, testing both the value and limits of art in a time of vanishing publics and permanent war. The long title poem, written in a strict iambic prose, charts the disappearance of the poetic into the prosaic, of meter into the mundane, while reactivating the very possibilities it mourns: O'Brien's prosody invests the prose of things with the intensities of verse. In the charged space of this hybrid form, objects become subjects and sense pivots mid-sentence into song: 'The sun revolves around the earth revolves around the sun.'

"The spare, elegiac poems in Geoffrey O'Brien's new collection move at the borderline between actual memory and screen memory. I love their chiseled intimate strangeness. Reading them I discover such marvels as 'shivers of light/Clashing/ or 'Not knowing who/or what we are/ we at least know when.' A pervading sense of loss envelops many of his finest poems in a mist of elliptical particles produced by distance. His language, echoing the best moments of his poetic film criticism, offers up fugitive ghost words and spectral syllables - dreamed or imagined. 'The shop is shuttered/ and the yard so quiet/you can hear the noise/of shadows vanishing.'" - Susan Howe

"O'Brien's [is] a poetry that asks for patient attention, and gives back all the void's abundance."--Rain Taxi "Whether in a poem composed using words and phrases from the Patriot Act, a sestina with dauntingly common repeating end words, or in flat-out theory, O'Brien shows himself to be capable of portraying the muddled traffic of life in the Internet age."--Publishers Weekly (starred review for Metropole) In his most autobiographical collection to date, Geoffrey G. O'Brien explores--via the "promise of happiness" in great works of art--the dream of a working freedom not relegated to Sundays. Crossing traditional poetic material with contemporary political struggle, O'Brien captures the complex feelings of the present. Here again just a few minutes To see what we've done with what they let us have. Like spring in Washington, D.C. The way we're taught to imagine days As reprieves from other days, cherries snowing Inexpressiveness, the nation's capital An experience of how it is to be Caught up in pink and white again. Geoffrey G. O'Brien is the author of Metropole (2011), Green and Gray (2007), and The Guns and Flags Project (2002), all from University of California Press.He is the co-author (with John Ashbery and Timothy Donnelly) of Three Poets: Ashbery, Donnelly, O'Brien (Minus A Press, 2012). O'Brien teaches at UC Berkeley and also for the Prison University Project at San Quentin State Prison.

"O'Brien's [is] a poetry that asks for patient attention, and gives back all the void's abundance."--Rain Taxi "Whether in a poem composed using words and phrases from the Patriot Act, a sestina with dauntingly common repeating end words, or in flat-out theory, O'Brien shows himself to be capable of portraying the muddled traffic of life in the Internet age."--Publishers Weekly (starred review for Metropole) In his most autobiographical collection to date, Geoffrey G. O'Brien explores--via the "promise of happiness" in great works of art--the dream of a working freedom not relegated to Sundays. Crossing traditional poetic material with contemporary political struggle, O'Brien captures the complex feelings of the present. Here again just a few minutes To see what we've done with what they let us have. Like spring in Washington, D.C. The way we're taught to imagine days As reprieves from other days, cherries snowing Inexpressiveness, the nation's capital An experience of how it is to be Caught up in pink and white again. Geoffrey G. O'Brien is the author of Metropole (2011), Green and Gray (2007), and The Guns and Flags Project (2002), all from University of California Press.He is the co-author (with John Ashbery and Timothy Donnelly) of Three Poets: Ashbery, Donnelly, O'Brien (Minus A Press, 2012). O'Brien teaches at UC Berkeley and also for the Prison University Project at San Quentin State Prison.

Experience in Groups sings and thinks the forms of belonging that organize our lives, offering poems that move with honesty and formal intelligence between the individual and the collective. In a time of ascendant fascism and creative political resistance, O'Brien's work demands that an elegy, love poem, and a sonnet sequence become occasions where personal tragedies and joys find a pattern and a place within national and global struggle.