Description
Poetry. THE STAR-SPANGLED BANNER spans the 15-year arc from 9/11 to 11/9, concluding with a poem based on voices overheard the night of Trump's election by poet Michael Ruby, a journalist who has covered U.S. politics for decades. Ruby began the book in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, when he saw people freely using U.S. national symbols for their own political purposes. He decided to do the same thing for poetic purposes. Every poem in the book, which is dedicated to Jasper Johns and Jimi Hendrix, uses the 81 words of the national anthem and inserts words into the spaces between them. The poems have different vocabularies—sometimes surrealist like Ruby's related book, AMERICAN SONGBOOK (2013), sometimes documentary and personal like his trilogy MEMORIES, DREAM, AND INNER VOICES (2012). THE STAR-SPANGLED BANNER is an artistic encounter with one of America's leading national symbols, using the frame of Francis Scott Key's War of 1812 lyrics in unexpected ways, and an unusual verbal and emotional portrait of the time from 9/11 to 11/9.
Author Bio
Michael Ruby is the author of many books including THE STAR-SPANGLED BANNER (Station Hill Press, 2020), At an Intersection (Alef, 2002), WINDOW IN THE CITY (BlazeVOX, 2006), THE EDGE OF THE UNDERWORLD (BlazeVOX, 2010), COMPULSIVE WORLDS (BlazeVOX, 2010), AMERICAN SONGBOOK (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013), and THE MOUTH OF THE BAY (BlazeVOX, 2019). His trilogy in prose and poetry, MEMORIES, DREAMS, AND INNER VOICES (Station Hill, 2012), includes the ebooks Fleeting Memories (Ugly Duckling, 2008) and Inner Voices Heard Before Sleep (Argotist Online, 2011). He is also the author of the ebooks Close Your Eyes (Argotist, 2018) and Titles & First Lines (Mudlark, 2018), and four chapbooks with the Dusie Kollektiv. He coedited Bernadette Mayer's collected early books, Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words (Station Hill, 2015), and Mayer's and Lewis Warsh's prose collaboration Piece of Cake (Station Hill, 2020). A graduate of Harvard College and Brown University's writing program, he works as an editor of US news and political articles at The Wall Street Journal.
Author City: BROOKLYN, NY USA