Experience in Groups

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Description

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.

Reviews

"O'Brien touches on the most pressing questions and dilemmas of being human in this time and place with welcome playfulness."
Publishers Weekly, starred review

"A lot of the poems deal with togetherness.They were us . . .To deal with togetherness, though, you have to deal with isolation, which the collection does.Experience in Groupsdeals with isolation and time, the restlessness knowing that we could spoil everything in an instant."
Cody Lee,Newpages

Author Bio

Geoffrey G. O'Brienis the author ofPeople on Sunday(Wave Books, 2013). He is also the author ofMetropole(2011),Green and Gray(2007), andThe Guns and Flags Project(2002), all from The University of California Press. He is the coauthor (with John Ashbery and Timothy Donnelly) ofThree Poets: Ashbery, Donnelly, O'Brien(Minus A Press, 2012) and (in collaboration with the poet Jeff Clark) of2A(Quemadura, 2006). O'Brien is an Associate Professor in the English Department at UC Berkeley and also teaches for the Prison University Project at San Quentin State Prison.