Poetry. RUMORED PLACE, Rob Halpern's first book, combines a near confessional narrative of physical passion with the documentation of "social fact." "The book," he states, "is situated between subjective desire and objective need." Any reader making way through RUMORED PLACE will feel intimations of transformation creeping all around the dark horizon. Here history is both fantasy and nightmare and this examination of it "a bad conscience that needs to become critique." "With an extraordinary soulful ferocity, Rob Halpern's new work commits itself to a lyric interrogation of power"--Camille Roy.

About the author: Halpern is the author of Rumored Place (Krupskaya 2004) and Disaster Suite (Vigilance Society 2006). His poems, short fiction, criticism, and translations appear in Bay Poetics, Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative, Chicago Review, War and Peace, Viz. Journal of the Interarts, Aufgabe, EOAGH: Queering Language, The Capilano Review, Submodern Fiction, and elsewhere. He holds a Ph.D. in Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Reviews:
http://jacketmagazine.com/29/cross-halpern.html