About Crows (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780299291945)

An unsentimental and at times disquieting first collection, the poems of About Crows excavate self, family, race, location, sex, art, and religion to uncover the artifacts of a succession of traumas that the speaker does not always experience firsthand but carries with him to refashion into some new importance. This is a book of half-states, broken affiliations, and dislocation. The speaker leads the reader through the fragments of a flooded town that grows increasingly elusive the more one looks for it; through a succession of Seoul "love motels" that further displace the outsider to unclaimed margins transformed into sites of creative invention; through "galleries" of artwork, where movement, color, and image are renewed through ekphrasis; and through the world of the metatextual long poem "The Cult Poem," where good and bad moral binaries tangle into a rat's nest of our best and worst spiritual ambitions. The poems and sequences of About Crows are marked by their artistic balance of the sublime and the profane, of polyphony, syntactical complexity, clashing images, cagey humor, and unsettling sincerity, all trying desperately to connect.

Author: Craig Blais
ISBN-10: 0299291944
ISBN-13: 9780299291945
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Language: English
Published: 05/17/2013
Pages: 72
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.35lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.80w x 0.30d
Award: Florida Book Award - Gold Medal Winner