More Gone: City Lights Spotlight No. 18

(Paperback)

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A scion of the New York School, Edmund Berrigan grew up in and around poetry. More Gone, number 18 in the Spotlight Poetry Series, is his first full-length collection in a decade, as well as the first to follow-up to his well-received memoir Can It!Written in a distinctive mix of New York quotidian and post-Language abstraction, More Gone documents the poet's search for domestic tranquility amidst the city that never sleeps. Berrigan draws on a variety of materials, from songs to found language, assembling them into poems of oblique humor and wry perspective on the challenges of everyday existence. These poems aren't anecdotes or confessions so much as objects in their own right, even as they remain rooted in a recognizable urban landscape: "Mostly, the city is begging for love, grieving, / or telling us to back the fuck off." "In More Gone, Eddie Berrigan shows so much writing savvy it has long sleeves, on which he wears his heart. There are poems with strategic non sequiturs which yield an inherent logic that convinces and leads to unfamiliar perceptions. There are multi-line riffs during which he works the count, throwing three or four different pitches. The last will look like a fastball, but it's a slider, low and away, and down you go. In simpler compositions he redirects you with subtle shifts of time and context. He includes himself, which gives a poem its worth. A vulnerable and movingly confident self. He impresses with deep impressions."-John Godfrey "The language employed in Edmund Berrigan's More Gone infuses itself on the lateral plane, variegated as it is by glints from particulars that rely 'on sensory input to motion.' He teases beauty out of terminus via tenuous electrification. One feels clarity evince itself through an opaque psychic transparency, a transparency that magically filters lingual seepage. Thus, our consciousness is marked by an incremental elevation providing us with an experience of language that engages our capacity to cast greater light on the stark complexity that we optically imbibe as daily reality."-Will Alexander "Edmund Berrigan's poems may be 'more gone,' but they are also more here. 'Anxious, patient and sentient,' they happen at an intimate core of self, family, community, and world, webbing out in all our neighboring shades and activities of being, where experience glitches and knits. They are rollercoastery, beautiful, knowing, revelatory, and real."-Eleni Sikelianos

Reviews

Praise for More Gone:

"Edmund Berrigan's More Gone follows his book Can It! in the creation of a poetic universe of sonic fizz and existential vulnerability. These poems are raucous artifacts of whimsy, pain, and the intricate joy of carrying an interior world into language. In a sense, More Gone is a large-scale sifting-through of the effects of living, both bewilderingly and comfortably, as part of a poetry family (along with Alice Notley and Anselm Berrigan) and within a wider tradition of New York School poetics."The Georgia Review

Praise for Edmund Berrigan:

I couldnt help but recall my all-time-favorite diary project, Joe Brainards Bolinas Journal. Lyn Hejinians cycling musical motifs in My Life seemed to get echoed by Can It!s repetitive structures. Eileen Myless Chelsea Girls and James Schulyers diaries and John Wieners 707 Scott Street all came to mind.Andy Fitch

Eddie Berrigan gives a nod to his lineage, acknowledging his upbringing as poetrys child. Berrigans music, laced with undercurrents of violence and tension, is elegant and hysterically absurd by turns. These poems are a blueprint for a new generation of young American PoetsBrenda Coultas

A rare sort of spy for the imperfect pitchJohn Coletti

The strengths of the collection are multiple, from the emotional content to the narrative threads that ride deep throughout, and the breaks that exist between them through the collage-aspect of the final text. Can It! is a book of memory, comfort and being, and works through some difficult territory, from the loss of his father to the loss of his step-father. In the end, this is a conversation Berrigan is able to have through writing, and one that we should consider ourselves fortunate enough to have access to.Rob McLennan

Can It! is also a fully realized post-Language-School work, sections of which strive to tear apart Berrigans established personae and voices, and a playful tribute to the avant-garde surrealist aesthetic that was ushered into America nearly a century ago. These styles and traditions jumble together from section to section and form a whole that is rife with Whitman-esque contradictions and pleasantly revels in its inability to be pinned down in genre or intent.Janice Lee

Berrigan deserves attention for offering up something new without chagrin and charged with vitality. These are poems you may walk about in.Patrick James Dunagan

Author Bio

Edmund Berrigan is the author of two books of poetry, Disarming Matter (Owl Press, 1999) and Glad Stone Children (Farfalla, 2008), and a memoir, Can It! (Letter Machine Editions, 2013). He is editor of The Selected Poems of Steve Carey (Sub Press, 2009), and is co-editor with Anselm Berrigan and Alice Notley of The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (University of California, 2005) and The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan (University of California, 2010). He records and performs music as I Feel Tractor, and lives in Brooklyn.