Author: Ander Monson
Publisher:
Published: 2010
Total Pages: 85
ISBN-13: 9781932511833
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The Available World is strikingly original and often exhilarating. This is a refreshing and knowledgeable voice that drew me into listening carefully. There are only a few books of poems a year that engross you so convincingly.---Jim Harrison Monson's poems celebrate defiant excess. In this land of scarcity, right living involves using up what you have, where you have it; otherwise someone might wreck, steal, or use it and you might not get any more....[A] carpe diem for obscure, doomed youth.---Stephen Burt in The Believer "I would like some kind of notification/that I am not alone" writes Ander Monson in poems full of hard-earned music, punctuated with upholstery, gasoline fumes, kitchen cabinets, calculus, emergency rooms, baseball, bathroom floors, and other details of twenty-first-century American life. Monson forces these details into a lyric to make a sermon for our days. Rarely will a reader these days find sermons that are so utterly contemporary and yet so unmistakably a part of a long tradition in the American lyric. There are "forces at work here that are not apparent on the first viewing" in this book, and there are "fireworks dismantling the sky." "Of all the somnambulists / trolling the floors of the town" of American poetics, Ander Monson is surely a master whose work will be remembered by more than "a line in the paper" of tomorrow. For his is the poetry of "necessary glory."---Ilya Kaminsky In The Available World, poet Ander Monson parses, sings, and sifts his way through the abundant offerings of the modern, digital world. The result is a whirlwind of linguistic energy. Some poems are sermons, others elegies, addressing the margin between real and virtual, where we increasingly spend out time. Here, human and machine memory collide; bodies are interchangeable with the ghosts of cyberspace. Vectors bind these poems together: "There is a missing mother, a damaged / armless brother, a drunk father, a car crash." As always, Monson has an eye to the weather and its godlike force. "There / are a lot of forces working here that are not all / apparent on first viewing," he writes. Perhaps most of all, The Available World invokes Katamari Damacy, a Japanese phrase for "clump spirit," and also the title of a puzzle-action video game that asks you to roll the world's objects into a ball and throw it into space where, if big and beautiful enough, it will become a star.
