A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems

(Paperback)

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Beginning with his first book, Shouting at No One, published in 1983, through to his most recent, So Where Are We, published in 2017, A Certain Clarity provides a generous selection of Lawrence Joseph's poetry "of great dignity, grace, and unrelenting persuasiveness" (John Ashbery), each poem "an inspired, made thing by a poet-advocate who has honed a timely song within an urgent testimony that embraces the complex density of truth" (Yusef Komunyakaa). Joseph's poems comprise one of the most essential and visionary bodies of work in contemporary American poetry. No other American poet covers the poetic territory Joseph does, as he invents an imaginatively spacious language global in ambition, acutely attentive to power structures that are violent and create violence, bearing witness to the velocities of historical change embodied in endless wars, unleashed finance capital, racism, and ecological destruction. But his poetry also reflects a deep, sensual intimacy, driven by an awareness of a poetic order in which beauty, love, and justice are indistinguishable. Joseph has written an ongoing chronicle of what it means to write poetry in the turbulent times in which we live. His ever-new, always alive interactions of shifting thoughts, voices, and languages-impacted by his Lebanese and Syrian Catholic heritage, his professional life as a lawyer and legal scholar, and the economies of the world of working-class labor from which he comes-register the speed and multilayered dimensions of our common experience on various spatial, temporal, and social planes. Intellectually and emotionally fierce, laser-like and satiric, phenomenally aligning sight to sound and observation to feeling, meticulously formed, displaying a love of line, shape, and painterly color, Joseph's poems press back against the high-stakes pressures of our time with a moral and aesthetic intensity not easily forgotten.

Reviews

Named a Best Book of 2020 by Literary Hub

Praise for Lawrence Joseph

[Joseph] builds a language that aspires to take in the complexity of the world, through both conscious explanation and self-suppressing, reverent looking . . . The anger that formed the voice to start with, amid the blood of the family grocery store in Detroit, has spent a lifetime finding ways to articulate itself with dignity against the many enemies of the self in this world. The bosses may have changed, the labor shifted, and the landscapes altered, but Joseph continues to dance before the machines, to work and remember in order to survive. --Declan Ryan, The New York Review of Books

If ours in an age of anger, then Lawrence Joseph' is our acknowledged poet laurate . . . [S]ublimating his wrath into exquisite lyricism . . . [Joseph] is more than suited for the role, given that chroniclers of downfalls typically go unheeded in their own time . . . It is unsurprisingly pleasing in these politically disappointing times to read a poet who always knows exactly who to blame." --Andr Naffis-Sahely, Poetry

No less than John Ashbery's, Joseph's poems soak up and savor common phrases . . . A poetry of force, and of statement, but somehow not always of forceful statement, Joseph's is one in which verbal extravagance . . . He is one who derives equal power from looking into violence's face and turning toward the beautiful as a compensatory violence of vivid sensations in which he rests his moral hope . . . A Certain Clarity is a major work of American art that lives up to its early promise. --Paul Franz, The New York Times

Almost uniquely among contemporary American poets, Joseph doesn't retail privities, doesn't chase the minuscule scraps of sublimity left to us, doesn't retreat to his literal or figurative cabin in the woods . . . I remember saying to myself long ago that if you are looking for a poetry that lucidly and systematically offers a sense of this world as a place where things go continually wrong, there is no one but Lawrence Joseph. --Michael Hofmann, The London Review of Books

"Throughout his career (he published his first book in 1983) Joseph has synthesized the unlikeliest lexicons--from legalese and street slang to overheard speech and jargon--and created a taut, sinuous medium capable of handling modern life without sacrificing his ability to sing. His is a poetry of the immediate present built to outlast ephemerality." --Declan Ryan, Times Literary Supplement

"[O]ne of our most acute poetic chroniclers."--David Orr, The New York Times Book Review

"Joseph is a moralist, and the narrators of [his] poems . . . lash out at the violence of the contemporary world . . . But in his vision violence coexists with, and is occasionally transformed by, beauty and love . . . to create a mosaic that melds seeming opposites--violence and transcendence, ancient and contemporary themes, the quotidian and the exalted--into poems both relevant and lasting."--David Skeel, Wall Street Journal

"Joseph seems to be writing ahead of actual events, and that makes him one of the scariest writers I know."--David Kirby, The New York Times Book Review

Author Bio

Lawrence Joseph was born and raised in Detroit, the grandson of Lebanese and Syrian Catholic immigrants. A graduate of the University of Michigan, University of Cambridge, and University of Michigan Law School, he is the author of six books of poetry, most recently So Where Are We, and two books of prose: Lawyerland, a nonfiction novel; and The Game Changed: Essays and Other Prose. He is the Tinnelly Professor of Law at St. John's University School of Law, and has taught creative writing at Princeton. He lives in New York City.