John Emil Vincent – författare

The past grabs back / what it lets us handleBitter in the Belly reckons with suicide’s wreckage. After John Emil Vincent’s best friend descends into depression and hangs himself, fluency and acuity lose their lustre.Vincent sorts through and tries to arrange cosmologies, eloquence, narrative, insight, only to find fatal limitations. He tries to trick tragedy into revealing itself by means of costume, comedy, thought experiment, theatre of the absurd, and Punch and Judy. The poems progress steadily from the erotic and mythic to the lapidary and biblical, relentlessly constructing images, finding any way to bring the world into the light – what there is of light, when the light is on.In his most personal book, Vincent moves from stark innocence through awful events and losses, to something like acceptance without wisdom – Jonah spit back onto the sand with little to report but that he’s home.

The past grabs back / what it lets us handleBitter in the Belly reckons with suicide’s wreckage. After John Emil Vincent’s best friend descends into depression and hangs himself, fluency and acuity lose their lustre.Vincent sorts through and tries to arrange cosmologies, eloquence, narrative, insight, only to find fatal limitations. He tries to trick tragedy into revealing itself by means of costume, comedy, thought experiment, theatre of the absurd, and Punch and Judy. The poems progress steadily from the erotic and mythic to the lapidary and biblical, relentlessly constructing images, finding any way to bring the world into the light – what there is of light, when the light is on.In his most personal book, Vincent moves from stark innocence through awful events and losses, to something like acceptance without wisdom – Jonah spit back onto the sand with little to report but that he’s home.

Injury the guide explained / is what / guides explainChatty Cathy, while not the first talking doll, was certainly the most widely known, and the only one elevated to idiom. This unauthorized chronicle of her later career luridly illustrates the perils of reaching such linguistic heights with so very little to say.In The Decline and Fall of the Chatty Empire Jojo, Gypsy May, Marge, Tootles, and Cathy’s entire gang undertake an abject odyssey to celebrity. On their adventure, they have many picnics, listen to NPR inattentively, play charades, and discover sharp things hidden in love’s thick folds. They end where they began, unutterably broken and luminous.Returning to the snarfs and loving exasperation of his first book, Excitement Tax, John Emil Vincent swipes left and right like no one else writing today. Because why would they?

Injury the guide explained / is what / guides explainChatty Cathy, while not the first talking doll, was certainly the most widely known, and the only one elevated to idiom. This unauthorized chronicle of her later career luridly illustrates the perils of reaching such linguistic heights with so very little to say.In The Decline and Fall of the Chatty Empire Jojo, Gypsy May, Marge, Tootles, and Cathy’s entire gang undertake an abject odyssey to celebrity. On their adventure, they have many picnics, listen to NPR inattentively, play charades, and discover sharp things hidden in love’s thick folds. They end where they began, unutterably broken and luminous.Returning to the snarfs and loving exasperation of his first book, Excitement Tax, John Emil Vincent swipes left and right like no one else writing today. Because why would they?

Why are my problems / always the worst? // And why / because I wrote that / do you think I don’t believe it?

White Lily is John Emil Vincent’s love note to Louise Glück and Laurie Anderson, two artists inspired and bedevilled by white lilies.

Under their spell the poet dives into parable, fable, received wisdom, compact discs, and ruined utopias like a gleeful truant child. The white lily is ever present - its meanings, messages, and seductive scent. The collection begins with a meditation on Anderson’s song “White Lily” and its treatment of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s fourteen-hour film Berlin Alexanderplatz. It goes on to ponder whether, if we take them in earnest, our mistakes come to serve as the surest sign of seriousness.

Throughout, Vincent’s poems trouble what’s exact and exacting, always with the white lily as companion, a promise of rebirth delivered in funeral tones.

Why are my problems / always the worst? // And why / because I wrote that / do you think I don’t believe it?

White Lily is John Emil Vincent’s love note to Louise Glück and Laurie Anderson, two artists inspired and bedevilled by white lilies.

Under their spell the poet dives into parable, fable, received wisdom, compact discs, and ruined utopias like a gleeful truant child. The white lily is ever present - its meanings, messages, and seductive scent. The collection begins with a meditation on Anderson’s song “White Lily” and its treatment of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s fourteen-hour film Berlin Alexanderplatz. It goes on to ponder whether, if we take them in earnest, our mistakes come to serve as the surest sign of seriousness.

Throughout, Vincent’s poems trouble what’s exact and exacting, always with the white lily as companion, a promise of rebirth delivered in funeral tones.