Alien candor : selected poems, 1970-1995 / Andrei Codrescu.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Codrescu, Andrei, 1946-

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Penn Provenance:

Codrescu, Andrei, 1946- (autograph) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copies 1 & 2)

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copies 1 & 2)

Physical Description:

303 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Santa Rosa : Black Sparrow Press, 1996.

Summary:

Perhaps America has always been best perceived through alien eyes. Surrealist reporter, revolutionary speculator, partisan of poetics, intellectual provocateur. Romanian emigre Andrei Codrescu, a bedbug in his adopted land's Sleep of Reason, has ingrained his trenchant, idiosyncratic critical view, his nimble wit and sparkling ironic intelligence, into the weave of our national text. In fact it's hard to imagine the culture of the American millennium without him.

Codrescu's activities as a public radio commentator (for NPR), editor (Exquisite Corpse), novelist (The Blood Countess), movie star (Road Scholar) are well documented. His poetry is undeservedly less well known.

This chronological selection, edited by the poet himself, liberally culls from a body of work that includes more than a dozen hard-to-find small press poetry volumes. It's fronted by a useful autobiographical reflection, in which Codrescu sets the stage for his poems: walking us through his years of revolution and passion in New York in the Sixties, evoking benign and exalted emanations of a liberated pleasure-dome San Francisco in the Seventies, charting darkening and deepening notes picked up later among North Coast redwood forests, and tracing the "sober rage" of more recent years of argument and reportage. The distance between the two figures of engagement, embattled critic and involved poet, Codrescu reminds us, has for him always been considerable: "My own work has had its own lyric momentum and mysterious drive that has little to do with the quarrels in question". Andrei Codrescu has always been poet first of all.

Contents:

From a Trilogy of Birds

A Thing

"I'm careful with my dreams of death ..."

The License to Carry a Gun

Partiti Sunt Vestimenta Mea ...

"There is an orange rotting on the table ..."

Epitaph (1)

Food

Winter in Istanbul

Shop

All Wars Are Holy

Gist

Note

Letter to Ezra Pound

Second Letter to Junk Jeannee of NYC

Testing. Testing

Reverse

Zzzzzzzzzzzzz

Imported Days

For Marg / So She Could Fuck Again

1st Avenue Basics

Dream Dogs

Debts

I Visit Brooklyn with a Queen in Mind

Poem for Kyra

Dear Editors:

The History of the Growth of Heaven

To the Virgin as She Now Stands to the Monk After a Beatles Movie

Faith Relearned

My Next Book

The Sin of Wanting a New Refrigerator

More about Poems

The Indecent Assumptions, the Slaughter Songs

Gifts of Percussion

The Status of the Monk

About Photography

A Programme for the Double Barrel Life When It Hits.

Local Notes:

Gotham Book Mart Collection copy 1 is paperback edition signed by the author.

Gotham Book Mart Collection copy 2 is hardcover trade edition signed by the author.

Other Format:

Online version: Codrescu, Andrei, 1946- Alien candor.

ISBN:

157423014X

9781574230147

1574230131

9781574230130

1574230158

9781574230154

OCLC:

35033609