Description
Poetry. THE YEAR OF THE ROOSTER offers in its title work a kinetic, convulsive, epic poem that explores and explodes through slippery, circumspect pronouns expectations of gender, the authority of artifice, the act of looking, and the action of thought. Is the rooster a trope? Is he a trooper? Maybe he's a she and she's the expectation of masculine bravado he's trying to unmask. Part action painting, part abstract estrangement, part enactment of the artist's uncertainty about all things art, the weird world of this poem is forever in flux, off-kilter, unanswerable. Planting bullets in the flowerbed of the sonnet, "Diminishing Returns" and "Returning Diminishments," two extended, meditative yet humorous suites, bookend the title poem.
"Tracking the motions of these witty, reflective poems is like wandering through a chambered nautilus with a Virgil in a crisis of self-doubt about his mission. The nautilus resembles a mirrored city, then a garden, or it's sliced and pinned to the wall as art, or hung up like a human in a suit or skirt whose self-fashioned day is morphing. Audacious and brilliant work."—Cathy Wagner
"In the ocean of images a sonnet tide ebbs and returns while within that fearful symmetry identity picks a way between mirrors and windows grateful that thought has mergeable labels, that adjectives are nouns, and that no things abut ideas: THE YEAR OF THE ROOSTER shall be your map and guide."—Tom Raworth
"One might deduce from the striking, oversized, and multi-headed cock that adorns the cover that the work is a cautionary tale of scientific hubris in the tradition of Michael Crichton's chef-d'oeuvre Jurassic Park. A swift look at the publisher's website informs me that this is (of course) not the case. I've been waiting to read this book since Noah told me about it on my porch 6 years ago. I recommend you join me."—Richard Froude
Author Bio
Noah Eli Gordon is the author of several books, including IS THAT THE SOUND OF A PIANO COMING FROM SEVERAL HOUSES DOWN? (Solid Objects, 2018), THE WORD KINGDOM IN THE WORD KINGDOM (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2015), and Novel Pictorial Noise (Harper Perennial, 2007), which was selected by John Ashbery for the National Poetry Series and subsequently chosen for the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award. He teaches in the MFA Program for Creative Writing at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he currently directs Subito Press.
Author City: BOULDER, CO USA