Body & Glass

(Hardback)

Available Formats

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Body & Glass extends Koeneke's experimentations in Ertruria with a tightly woven set of more compact poems that brighten and sharpen the lyric's usual corners. The 'anonymous' forms of folk song and epitaph, parable and textual fragment, arrange to sketch the selves, living and dead, who might say them. These are poems of an improvised interiority, shared between the poet and reader but broad enough for multitudes.

Reviews

"'A star arriving firmly / at the center of its cluster' isRodney KoenekesBody & Glass. There is something very singing and also staid about these poems. I mean they have both a freshness and the mark of an experienced hand behind them. I hesitate to call it a 'maturity' because it has a jouissance I don't associate with that word. These poems continue to yield fruit on multiple readings: 'furzed glebe' . . . 'prefer your lineaments / to any rotting / thing this world adores.' They feel nutritious to me somehow, nutrient-dense, coming out of great care, great grief, great toil (for all their sprezzatura): 'antiphons' slurring / surmising the psalm.'"
Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Poetry Foundation

"The poems in Body & Glass read as if theyre dissolving in the volatile solvent that is thinking, and though its easy to be carried away when Koeneke waxes with tools like assonance and spontaneous rhymecarried away to a place where recognition of the poems work can often be dusted out of vantageit is just as important to see the back and forth between body and glass, between naming and name. The cumulative effect of reading many of Koenekes poems in one sitting feels like the mind being crocheted, portions hidden away into lockets, others coded into nodes."
Tyler Flynn Dorholt, 4squarereview

"Composed with an incredible, subtle sharpness, his is a poetics, and even a politics, that embrace both optimism and exhaustion."
Rob McLennan's Blog

"Much of his book plays with notions of agency. There is a particularly effective destabilizing shift between the third-person mode of some of his poems' titles and the 'I' that then acts out those titles . . . Koeneke's blend of pathos, erudition, and whimsy results in an enjoyable collection that rewards repeated engagement."
Publishers Weekly

Author Bio

Rodney Koeneke is author of the poetry collections Body & Glass (forthcoming, Wave Books, 2018), Etruria(Wave Books, 2014), Musee Mechanique (BlazeVOX, 2006), and Rouge State(Pavement Saw, 2003). An early member of the Flarf collective, he was active in the San Francisco Bay Area poetry scene until 2006, when he moved to Portland, Oregon where he teaches in the History Department at Portland State University.