Description
Poetry. Aaron Kunin believes that the part of yourself that you're most ashamed of is interesting and can be used as material for art. The poems of THE SORE THROAT, his second collection, come out of self-imposed semiotic limitation, yet manifest a fully inhabited psychological environment. Working with a limited vocabulary—200 words derived from a nervous habit of transcription—and with specific source texts—Ezra Pound's "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" and Maurice Maeterlinck's play Pelléas et Mélisande—Kunin makes hymn, epigram, ode, elegy, ballad, conversation, invective, confession, epitaph, inability, protest, love poem, (praise, valentine, aubade, seduction, defense of inconstancy), riddle, cosmogony, theodicy, vanity, and misplaced concreteness among his modes d'emploi. Combining rigorous formal procedure with a kind of automatic writing, THE SORE THROAT produces poems of unlikely, and heightened, sensitivity to nuances of feeling.
Author Bio
Aaron Kunin is the author of FOLDING RULER STAR (Fence, 2005), a collection of small poems about shame; THE MANDARIN (Fence, 2008), a novel; THE SORE THROAT & OTHER POEMS (Fence Books, 2010); GRACE PERIOD: NOTEBOOKS, 1998-2007 (Letter Machine Editions, 2013), a book of aphorisms, sketches, and fragments; COLD GENIUS (Fence Books, 2014), and LOVE THREE (Wave Books, 2019). Character as Form, a book of criticism, is also forthcoming from Bloomsbury. He lives in California where he works as a literature professor at Pomona College.
Author City: CLAREMONT, CA USA