{"product_id":"it-is-if-i-speak-joe-wenderoth-9780819563903","title":"It Is If I Speak","description":"New poems from the most iconoclastic poet of his generation. In the epigraph to Joe Wenderoth's new volume of poetry, a herdsman, exhorted by Oedipus to speak the truth, replies \"It is if I speak that I will be destroyed.\" Wenderoth's poetry is sparse, nihilistic -- and sometimes witty. Publishers Weekly wrote that, \"Like Stevens, Wenderoth has a passion for philosophical ideas; at the same time he follows Williams' dictum: no ideas but in things. The result is poetry that is intellectually charged but whose final fidelity is to the senses.\" His new book has the dignity of a sincere and ferocious despair. In the narratives of these poems, \"owing is all that really happens,\" and lives are shaped by the refusal to \"sink dumbly into tolerance of a spectacle.\" \"In a courageous follow-up to Disfortune (1995), Wenderoth populates his poems with austere voices that assert a strange and prophetic authority over us even as they seem naive, almost nascent . . . Cumulatively, the voice and vision of these poems suggest an up-to-the-minute Kafka; Wenderoth presents a deadeningly organized world and scrutinizes it for untouched lyricism.\" -- Boston Review \"Wenderoth's exquisite evocations of finely discriminated loss offer moody evasions of concrete statement, electing paradox and abstraction . . . Much praised for his 1995 debut, Disfortune, Wenderoth shows himself in this second volume to be a competent inheritor of an abstraction-wearied symbolist tradition many had given up for dead.\" -- Publishers Weekly\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Joe Wenderoth\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-10:\u003c\/b\u003e 0819563900\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9780819563903\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e Wesleyan University Press\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 03\/15\/2000\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 83\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Paperback\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 0.34lbs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSize:\u003c\/b\u003e 8.98h x 6.01w x 0.28d\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eReview Citation(s): \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e 03\/06\/2000 pg. 108\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eLibrary Journal\u003c\/i\u003e 04\/15\/2000 pg. 96","brand":"Joe Wenderoth","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":43990401351935,"sku":"9780819563903","price":15.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0662\/2982\/9887\/files\/img_cf3749af-47a2-4baa-bbc3-27c1b3004c21.jpg?v=1683304465","url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/it-is-if-i-speak-joe-wenderoth-9780819563903","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}