Shame / Shame

(Paperback)

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"Devin Becker's Shame | Shame is a brilliant debut collection. Here, the prose poem has been re-imagined as a cinematic vignette, yet rooted as deeply in the American Northwest as anything in Richard Hugo and David Lynch. Raw, intimate, and elliptical in its metaphysics, Devin Becker's poetry captures an idiomatic recklessness while navigating those angular narratives of our contemporary lives."
David St. John
Devin Becker grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and lives in Moscow, Idaho, where he works as digital initiatives librarian at the University of Idaho Library. He was named a 2014 "Mover and Shaker" by Library Journal.

Reviews

"[An] engaging first book of prose and free-verse poems. Bending to the expectation that prose narrates, he fashions miniature stories--anecdotes, jokes maybe--about not humiliation but existential embarrassment, the conviction that surely being human shouldn't entail the feelings it does... Besides prose poetry, Becker has also mastered e. e. cummings' skinny, crawl-down-the-page poem, to similar, gotta-read-it-again effect." --Booklist "When God was still too young to know any better, he touched 'THE VOID,' which, 'in a rush to fill the space His finger left,/...sent out a universe in ripples.' It shamed God that He'd disturbed perfection. He needed a toy. What He came up with (and then discarded to us) was the world Devin Becker evokes in these uncommonly intimate pages. If there are items in Becker's life too small or humbling to elude his gift for turning them into irresistible news, not one of them has slipped past him into the graces of this, his first (extremely welcome) book." --James McMichael "Devin Becker has written a drop-dead funny book about desolation, isolation, self-punishment, and shame. Only one for whom humor is a necessity really understands humor. Jokes can be a means of survival and almost redemptive if they make inchoate private suffering communal through its expression, and, like poems, the vitality of jokes depends on rhetorical skill, emotional authenticity, luminous intelligence, and impeccable timing-all characteristics of Devin Becker's writing that makes it so engaging and moving and exhilarating." --Michael Ryan "Becker isn't trying to depress you, but to impress upon you the comic relief inherent in an awareness of the double-sidedness of shame--all while trying to capture the mutability of interpretations. He hybridizes the prose poem form with the diary entry in an heretofore unmatched quest to understand how we put our experiences to words, and how narrative both fails us and somehow succeeds. The result is a collection whose multidimensional pieces invite a new experience with every read." --Sarah Katz, Nano Fiction

Author Bio

Devin Becker: Devin Becker grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and holds degrees from Williams College, the University of California, Irvine, and Indiana University. His poetry and research articles have been published in American Archivist, Cutbank, Faultline, Microform and Digitization Review, Midwestern Gothic, The Pinch, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He currently lives in Moscow, Idaho, where he works as the digital initiatives librarian at the University of Idaho Library. David St. John: Over the course of his career, David St. John has been honored with many of the most significant awards for poets, including fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, The Rome Fellowship, an Award in Literature from The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the O. B. Hardison Prize (a career award for teaching and poetic achievement) from The Folger Shakespeare Library, the George Drury Smith Lifetime Achievement Award, and a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation. His work has been published in countless literary magazines, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Harper's, Antaeus, and The New Republic, and has been widely anthologized. David St. John is the author of ten collections of poetry, as well as a volume of essays, interviews and reviews, and is co-editor of American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of the New Poem. He currently teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.