Experience in Groups

(Paperback)

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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's poems] bring to bear the full resources of English prosody on our insane political present while also maintaining a position of wonder before the material world.--Ben Lerner, The New Yorker

This [collection] proves to be an intriguing, thoughtful, and ambitiously layered collection, drawing from the past to hold a mirror to the present.--Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

One of the most exciting poets now writing.--Craig Morgan Teicher, Time Out New York

What is the fate of a surface in destruction The surface of O'Brien's writing is already showing us. It proliferates, breaking down into countless facets--line, phrase, word--each of which carries a full poetic charge.--Cole Swensen, Boston 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 Groups deals with isolation and time, the restlessness knowing that we could spoil everything in an instant.
--Cody Lee, Newpages

"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

Author Bio

Geoffrey G. O'Brien is the author of Experience in Groups (Wave Books, forthcoming 2018) and People on Sunday (Wave Books, 2013), as well as the author of Metropole (2011), Green and Gray (2007), and The Guns and Flags Project (2002), all from The University of California Press. His chapbooks included Hesiod (Song Cave, 2010) and Poem with No Good Lines (Hand Held Editions, 2010). He is the coauthor (with John Ashbery and Timothy Donnelly) of Three Poets: Ashbery, Donnelly, O'Brien (Minus A Press, 2012) and (in collaboration with the poet Jeff Clark) of 2A (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.