Poetry. SOME NOTES ON MY PROGRAMMING finds Anselm Berrigan once more in funny, irritable, tip-top form. Surveying the Bush-era cultural landscape and not liking what it sees, the poetry herein confronts that reality in terms disgusted ("The group is/an asshole./Self-censorship/is the American avant-garde") and terrifying ("Dreamt I was chopping off fingers/of mine with audience. Not cool"), encompassing odd disclosure ("I don't want my brother to get a job ever") and biting satire ("Osama passes/George the bong/bitching about 21st century/hydroponic weed"). And yet, even if we are all just "Trained Meat," as the title of one poem suggests, the work here never gives in to despair; we may be "under attack/in mourning/all at once" but we also "better make//room for each/grief letting/me see what/lines and/lies/not to take/and how/moment/by moment/to be." A fantastic and necessary book.

Author City: NEW YORK, NY USA

Anselm Berrigan is the author of six books of poetry, most recently NOTES FROM IRRELEVANCE (Wave Books, 2011) and FREE CELL (City Lights Publishers, 2009). Other books include TO HELL WITH SLEEP (Letter Machine Editions, 2009), SOME NOTES ON MY PROGRAMMING (Edge Books, 2006), and ZERO STAR HOTEL (Edge Books, 2002). He is the current poetry editor for The Brooklyn Rail and co-editor, with Alice Notley and Edmund Berrigan, of The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (University of California Press, 2005) and The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan (University of California Press, 2011). A member of the subpress publishing collective, he has published THE SELECTED POEMS OF STEVE CAREY (2009) and Your Ancient See Through by Hoa Nguyen (2002). From 2003-2007 he was Artistic Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church, where he also hosted the Wednesday Night Reading Series for four years. He is Co-Chair, Writing at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, and also currently teaches writing at Pratt Institute and Brooklyn College. He was a New York State Foundation for the Arts fellow in Poetry for 2007, and has received two grants from the Fund for Poetry. He lives in New York City, where he grew up, with his wife, the poet Karen Weiser, and their daughter Sylvie.

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