Description
Poetry. "Alchemist, botanist, and reluctant prophet, Joel Bettridge comes to us announcing that 'We love what they call fantastic and heretic.' And it's true: in these insistent litanies, suffused with code-switching and historical synchronicities, the fantastic and the heretic continuously offer the promise of holiness and love. 'May you inherit the inscrutable,' declares the poet, knowing full well that his poems are part of that inheritance, but relying on his hypnotic rhythms and tantalizing visions to keep us reading. Thus we discover that with Bettridge, we are counted 'Among the bamboozled, the hoodwinked, the starry-eyed losers,' and yet 'among the slag and the splendor, counted among such a nation of priests.'"—Norman Finkelstein
Author Bio
Joel Bettridge is the author of four books of poetry: LIGATURES (Dos Madres Press, 2019), THE PUBLIC LIFE OF CHEMISTRY (The Cultural Society, 2018), PRESOCRATIC BLUES (Chax Press, 2009), and THAT ABRUPT HERE (The Cultural Society, 2007). He is also the author of the two critical studies Avant-Garde Pieties: Aesthetics, Race, and the Renewal of Innovative Poetics (Routledge, 2018) and Reading as Belief: Language Writing, Poetics, Faith (Palgrave, 2009). He co-edited, with Eric Selinger, Ronald Johnson: Life and Works (The National Poetry Foundation, 2008). He is Professor of English at Portland State University.
Author City: PORTLAND, OR USA