Description: Wake us up, George Wallace! "Beauty as intention" and the music of movement through memory, image, lush lyrical invocation, magnetic mind fields, people and scenes that remain as anchors and engines. Here is velocity, power of forward and backward merged into captivating presence - the shimmering of what endures.
Review Quotes:
Wake us up, George Wallace! "Beauty as intention" and the music of movement through memory, image, lush lyrical invocation, magnetic mind fields, people and scenes that remain as anchors and engines. Here is velocity, power of forward and backward merged into captivating presence -- the shimmering of what endures.
--Naomi Shihab Nye
Lanan Fellow, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets
Author of Transfer, You and Yours, and
19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East
These pieces stretch the bounds of poetry -- rambling passages of language, full of music and changing rhythms, repetition and parallel, dialectic and surreal digression. I admire their ethereal landscape imagery, freely associated, woven around a populist manifesto and haunted by figures of distant romance.
--Joseph Millar
NEA, Guggenheim Foundation Fellow
Author of Overtime, Blue Rust and Kingdom
George Wallace is a poet who shakes his fist against the shadows, who growls his defiance of the oncoming darkness. There are echoes of Whitman and Ginsberg in his long lines, his cascade of visceral images, his fiery denunciation of the machinery that crushes human beings, his passionate celebration of love and the loss of love, his embrace of life itself in all its mad contradictions. His voice is ecstatic, angry, tender, real and surreal. He is a poet of the city and a poet of the sea, a poet of history and of the moment, a poet of praise for the immigrants who built New York, a poet of prophecy condemning the violence of guns and oil pipelines. There is a powerful energy coursing through these poems, pumping like blood from the heart. 'Who touches this, touches a man, ' said Whitman. Yes, indeed.
--Martín Espada
Shelley Memorial Award, Guggenheim Foundation Fellow
Author of Trouble Ball, The Republic of Poetry, and
Vivas to Those Who Have Failed