Review

“‘Nothing can be truly interesting except the exhaustive,’ Thomas Mann wrote a long time ago. Many of these poems suggest a return to that spirit, in a poetry of wit, ideas, and exploration, with both ease and elegance. These are poems you want to put down and pick up again. And when you do, you find something you hadn’t seen last time. It’s a book I’m glad to have. You’ll be glad you have it, too.”

(Samuel R. Delany, author of Times Square Red, Times Square Blue)

“One might almost compare reading a Bernstein poem to walking through a New York City street during a rainstorm. You cannot but enjoy the way the neon signs and streetlights are mirrored in the myriad puddles created by the cracked sidewalks; but as you leap over them you land down hard on the concrete, sometimes with water on your pant legs. . . . Beautiful and lyrical . . . . These poems all made me laugh and cry, sometimes when reading a single page.”

(Hyperallergic)

“The term for two words in different languages that appear the same but have completely disparate meanings is a ‘false friend.’ Flip to any page in Charles Bernstein’s mercilessly brilliant, no-holds-barred new collection and you will encounter a friend you thought you knew, but this phrase, quotation, proverb, equation, cameo, bit of received language will have been evacuated and filled again by the poet’s constructions and reorientations. Bernstein puts words and their groupings, associations, and connotations ‘through the wringer,’ submitting them to a kind of durability test, so that when we emerge from the theater of one of his poems, rubbing our eyes to adjust to the light, our ossified relationship to the language we use has been pleasantly, productively obliterated. In the genius of Bernstein, a word is a whirl is a world.”

(Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen: An American Lyric)

About the Author

Charles Bernstein is Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is codirector of PennSound. He is the author of Pitch of Poetry and Recalculating, also published by the University of Chicago Press.