"Step outside with your language as Anselm Berrigan moves the parts about, seeing them dive through distress to rally with duly measured exhortation. The pitch is feverish: a topical Season in Hell, restorative history lessons during intermission, followed by a kind of precisely tumbling Grosse Fugue. The sensations never quit. (Poetry's our sole 'hedge against protection'?) This is a book to clear the decks."—Bill Berkson
"Impacted, trenchant, turbulent, heartbreaking and funny too, Free Cell is one poet's free fall through the streaming kaleidoscopic pixilated cacophony of now. Anselm Berrigan has consistently, and always boldly, delivered the news of his generation's angle of incident."—Peter Gizzi
"The world of Free Cell keeps repeating "have a good one" over and over, in anger, in sarcasm, and also just because it's what one needs to hear to keep going. Anselm Berrigan is the poet of the bodily breakdown, the poet of lyric memory, the poet that is this testy and yet also beautiful world needs right now."—Juliana Spahr
These are poems about getting by in the human universe through 'the icing of all personal / bureaucracies,' offices of existence where small and large injustices trigger passions within us that cannibalize us down to appetizers until we can regenerate in the company of fellow travelers.
— The Poetry Project Newsletter
Berrigan's fourth collection, and the second volume in City Lights' new Spotlight Series, is composed of three poems or sequences. The first and longest, “Have a Good One,” is an extended series of seemingly flippant personal and public observations (“Stop telling me/ I look tired.// I know what/ I look like.// Tell me/ how I feel”; “The problem of free will/ is not that it does or does not/ exist, but that it's pointless”) punctuated (or titled) with the phrase “Have a Good One,” which appears at least once per page. Berrigan (Some Notes on My Programming) may have learned some of his disjunctive sprawl and spontaneity from his famous poet parents, Alice Notley and especially Ted Berrigan, but his poems have a kind of slacker cool and political awareness all his own: “You are// what your// record says// you are,” he reminds. Next comes the book's only shortish poem, “Let Us Sample Protection Together,” in which “The room stares back from its things.” The book concludes with “To Hell with Sleep,” another skittery romp through Berrigan's associative haze. While he isn't reinventing poetry, he is carrying his parents' tradition of poetry as a way of life, a community, proudly into the 21st century. (Oct.)\
. . . Berrigan--whose fourth book of poems, Free Cell, is published by City Lights this month--has a relationship to poetry that's a little different from most. He grew up literally surrounded by the stuff. His father, Ted Berrigan, was a major figure in the second generation of New School poets who lived and wrote in and around the East Village in the sixties and seventies. . . . His mother, poet Alice Notley, the future Pulitzer Prize finalist, had just begun publishing her work. . . . Berrigan's new book, Free Cell, is composed of two long poems bridged by a forty-three-line poem titled 'Let us Sample Protection Together.'
[Berrigan] digests and mercilessly composts an endless variety of speech, with an excellent ear for the comedy of the banal - the sounds of corporate brainstorming sessions, rich people, even the unsympathetic reader. . . When he writes 'I like moving / your careful parts about,' he must be addressing Language, and reading this poem one gets the impression Berrigan may go on moving her parts indefinitely, as he follows the ominous momentum of these poems 'Back to the brink, as ever.'
—Julia Powers
Free Cell is the latest collection of free-verse poetry from writing instructor and dedicated poet Anselm Berrigan. The words themselves revel in the freedom to assume any shape in this smoothly rolling collection of musings and insights. The natural flow of the verbal rhythm serves as the perfect counterpoint to the thought-provoking commentary in this excellent collection. 'Frailty puckers up to present': Frailty puckers up to present / gibberish in the agri-fab / spamways, helicopter can't / swim, can't junk tribal / penance for living off natty / whims so many pairs of / pants deny in fever's dash. // The routine bites hard, ooze / a rapt factory heir teething / sway, ye olde time cleaners / spun off a granted project / of abeyance in the deep / trim that art savors, bent- / like, creaming dabbles.'
—James A. Cox
Anselm Berrigan's free radical poetry chops your hands off mid-line, drops the book into your lap, and caresses you with disquiet indie pop allusions and echoes of ubiquitous advertising absurdities as it cheers on that last ill-intentioned pint before the crestfallen exit from the pub on a Monday night while ambitiously and unambiguously telling you it might not be OK, but I wouldn't know anyway.
—Jason Eric Jensen
Anselm Berrigan's voice continues be one of the most refreshing in contemporary American poetry, for its singular welding of candor, political awareness, and humor that attempts, with a very high rate of success, to co-opt the commercial and political jargon of our times to return it to higher purposes (which here include but are not limited to free speech, dead-on paeans to and condemnations of contemporary life, and love).
—Virginia Konchan
