Poetry. BRIEF UNDER WATER is a sequence of 55 short passages that uses prose narrative as a design element in a larger lyric structure. The title refers to Kafka's 1919 Brief an den Vater, reflecting a struggle with the notion of literary inheritance. So does Console's sentence, refined nearly to the point of anachronism, that owes a great deal to Melville and to Garnett's translations of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev. The book was written while the author supported himself as a metalworker, housepainter, and waiter. The clashing of these professional spheres contributed to the struggle outlined above. The binary numbering (1, 10, 11, 100, 101...) is meant to express his sense of movement-in-place. "[The] manuscript is terrific...The sensory detail of the writing, not surrealistic, not plot-oriented, is not even with the sense of 'leading anywhere' but accumulating both detail and expansion at once, opening a floating, fascinating, sometimes apparently violent yet detached terrain, as if not the author's psyche—but the world itself—seen from at once extreme and mundane edges"—Leslie Scalapino.

Author City: LAWRENCE, KS USA

Cyrus Console is from Topeka, Kansas. He is the author of THE ODICY (Omnidawn, 2011) and BRIEF UNDER WATER (Burning Deck, 2008). He teaches at the Kansas City Art Institute and University of Kansas. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas.

Reviews and Other Links
Poet's Sampler introduced by Geoffrey G. O'Brien in Boston Review