Poetry. Aaron Kunin believes that the part of yourself that you're most ashamed of is interesting and can be used as material for art. The poems of THE SORE THROAT, his second collection, come out of self-imposed semiotic limitation, yet manifest a fully inhabited psychological environment. Working with a limited vocabulary—200 words derived from a nervous habit of transcription—and with specific source texts—Ezra Pound's "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" and Maurice Maeterlinck's play Pelléas et Mélisande—Kunin makes hymn, epigram, ode, elegy, ballad, conversation, invective, confession, epitaph, inability, protest, love poem, (praise, valentine, aubade, seduction, defense of inconstancy), riddle, cosmogony, theodicy, vanity, and misplaced concreteness among his modes d'emploi. Combining rigorous formal procedure with a kind of automatic writing, THE SORE THROAT produces poems of unlikely, and heightened, sensitivity to nuances of feeling.

Author Hometown: Los Angeles, CA USA



About the author: Aaron Kunin is the author of FOLDING RULER STAR (Fence, 2005), a collection of small poems about shame; THE MANDARIN (Fence, 2008), a novel; and THE SORE THROAT & OTHER POEMS (Fence Books, 2010). He lives in Los Angeles and is an assistant professor of negative anthropology at Pomona College.

Reviews:
James Wagner at Esther Press
Steve Evans in The Nation
Brian Foley's Best Poetry Books of 2010 @ No Tell Motel Poetry Blog
James Knippen in Front Porch Journal
G.R.O.A.N. @ CutBank Reviews
Aaron Kunin and Ben Lerner in conversation @ Jacket2