Poetry. Winner of the 2011 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. John Beer's first collection, THE WASTE LAND AND OTHER POEMS, employs the wit of a philosopher and the ear of a poet to stage ways of reading that are political, personal, and theoretical. The speaker of these poems also brings humor to the dissecting table, to prod the legacies of great works of the imagination while balancing irony and affection.
Author Hometown: CHICAGO, IL USA
About the author: John Beer's poems and criticism have appeared in DENVER QUARTERLY, Verse, Make, Chicago Review, The Canary, CROWD, The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. He lives in Chicago, and works as a theater critic for Time Out Chicago.
Reviews:
Levi Stahl @ the Quarterly Conversation
Michael Brodeur in the Boston Globe
One of Boston Review poetry editor Timothy Donnelly's six favorite poetry books of 2010
Winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award in 2011 from the Poetry Society of America
John Whalen @ CSU Center for Literary Publishing
“Only a genius could write a book called THE WASTE LAND AND OTHER POEMS. Well, John Beer is that person. ‘I set out to write a treatise on failure, and it turned out my subject was love,’ he writes. ‘Call it my confusion.’ We should all be so confused.”
—John Ashbery
“Am trying in a handful of sentences to write a blurb for John Beer's THE WASTE LAND AND OTHER POEMS—something that will describe the newness of the work and something that will praise the invention of it. Have been halfway tempted to simply steal a snippet from someone else's jacket and tailor it to suit J.B. If only it were that easy! Anything I find on the rack is too small. John Beer is a poet of big shoulders. You should have a feel for yourself.”
—D. A. Powell
“There is in John Beer, as I have known since our days in London, a bit of the last younger American poet living the tragedy of Europe. Thus, I was pleased when he sent me the manuscript of THE WASTE LAND AND OTHER POEMS (originally titled He Do the Police in Different Voices), asking for my editorial suggestions. Magnanimously, he accepted them all, and so this book is leaner by half than its writer originally envisioned. Strong poets like he know that false pride of Authorship is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture. I wrote to him, among other things, in the margin: The image is more than an idea; it is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy!! I also wrote: I guess the definition of a genius is a man or woman surrounded by lunatics. Well, I'll say the following and I won't say more. THE WASTE LAND AND OTHER POEMS may or may not be the most important book of American poetry in the last eighty-eight years, but when the next eighty-eight years are up, I give it a good shot to be the most important first book in American poetry since Some Trees. I've been right a number of times before, even if no one seems to be listening. Sometimes lightning strikes a church tower and the whole town catches fire. Who cares then that the act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions? There is surprise and there is awe. Nationalize the big banks.”
—Kent Johnson
“John Beer's long overdue first book is a perfect mirror of a world that has borrowed more than it can ever repay. He embraces and distills ‘the bad dream’ and all ‘the muck’ of the recent past, but the momentum of this book is full speed ahead. Unflinching, unrepentant, soulful, brilliantly imagined and with eyes wide open, he is the poet of onwardness for the next century. If ever a book lives up to its title, this one does.”
—Lewis Warsh