is this the body / if hovers

Description

Poetry. California Interest. "Todd Melicker reassembles two foundational texts of our culture—Shakespeare's sonnets and the Bible—like an archaeologist sifting through the fallen monuments of a vanished civilization, misaligning scattered pieces of meaning to reproduce a copy without an original. Working through the noise of our information-saturated century, Melicker's recombinant poems conduct an aura of silence that approaches the divine, convening a new season of eros that does not belong on any calendar. Here, the minimalism of Robert Lax meets the serious play of Ronald Johnson's erasures. In these pages, 'a halted / brilliance // hovers, covers / the world.'"—Andrew Joron

"Todd Melicker's poems arise from a spare economy of grace. His one or two word lines build poems made with care, not carefulness. Quiet, but deeply alert, IS THIS THE BODY / IF HOVERS registers a world that the reader will recognize as, somehow, true. That is, the lineaments of this world (mountain, deer, aspen, ash, mouth, earth, tongue) are coincident with the landscapes in which we walk and the bodies with which we perceive. At the same time, Melicker reconfigures what we know to startling effect ('she was / born a // lull in / aspen,' 'the palm / of my // tongue walks / through // the earth') to demonstrate that our perceptions can be altered to grant access into unfamiliar terrain. The articulations of these poems come from a tongue that 'spills / from leaves // as they could encase.'"—Elizabeth Robinson

"The poems in IS THIS THE BODY / IF HOVERS are lean testaments, tensile strands, runner's messages. They sing a tale of vowels and consonants as though it were a conversion narrative, while carrying the kind of information that startles when encountered, like sticks breaking underfoot. A fantastic sequence of poems."—George Albon

Author Bio