Description
Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Hybrid Genre. FREE BOAT: COLLECTED LIES AND LOVE POEMS selects from a sequence of sonnets written from 2008-2015. Reed, the author of five previous books (three novels and two "stunts") lends his voice and eclectic abilities to this singular work, which, in addition to being a book of sonnets, is part love letter, part literary ode, and part delusion.
Evolving the classical sonnet, a form which still captures our spirits, Reed summons our contemporary yearning: sugar sweet to splash of acid. "Come to me," writes Reed in sonnet #6, "like tomorrow to a child." Sonnet #41, in contrast, offers the lyrical confession, "All I want to do is stab people." With his plaintive lines, Reed gives expression to the inner ghost of the Twenty-First Century; sonnet #65, a valentine, wonders "Momma, are there other wooden children?"
FREE BOAT: COLLECTED LIES AND LOVE POEMS spans 54+ sonnets, and that's a lot of sonnets, but Reed's stylistic ease guides his audience through an experience more akin to reading a photo essay. Indeed, of the 23 images in FREE BOAT: COLLECTED LIES AND LOVE POEMS, 9 are photographs by the author. Rhapsody, serenade, picaresque, FREE BOAT would be as comfortably tabled with Nadja by André Breton, as it would be with The Dream Songs by John Berryman, Delta of Venus by Anaïs Nin, or Under the Net by Iris Murdoch.
Author Bio
John Reed has been published in Paper Magazine, The New York Press, Artforum, BOMB Magazine, Playboy, Vice Magazine, Out Magazine, Artforum, Art in America, The PEN Poetry Series, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Believer, Slate and Harpers; he's been included in four anthologies, including Best American Essays (Houghton Mifflin). He's author of the novels, A Still Small Voice (Delacorte Press), The Whole (MTV Books / Simon & Schuster), and of the dramatic work, All The World's A Grave (Plume) and the illustrated, nonfiction work, Tales of Woe (MTV Press). FREE BOAT (C&R Press, 2017) is his first book of poetry.
Author City: NEW YORK, NY USA