The Hotel Oneira: Poems

by August Kleinzahler

Overview

A thrilling new collection from one of the most original poets of his generation

"His work is a modernist swirl of sex, surrealism, urban life, and melancholy with a jazzy backbeat." While this praise appeared in the pages of The New York Times in 2005, it applies no less to August Kleinzahler's newest collection.
Kleinzahler's poetry is, as ever, concerned with permeability: voices, places, the real and the dreamed, the present and the past, all mingle together in verses that always ring true. Whether the poem is three lines long or spans several pages—whether the voice embodied is that of "an adult male of late middle age, // about to weep among the avocados and citrus fruits / in a vast, overlit room next to a bosomy Cuban grandma" as in "Whitney Houston," or that of the title character in "Hootie Bill Do Polonius," who is bidding "adios compadre // To a most galuptious scene Kid"—Kleinzahler finds the throbbing human heart at the core of experience.
This is a poet searching for—and finding—a cadence to suit life as it's lived today. Kleinzahler's verses are, as noted in the judges' citation for the 2004 Griffin Poetry Prize for his collection The Strange Hours Travelers Keep, "ferociously on the move, between locations, between forms, between registers." The Hotel Oneira finds Kleinzahler at his shape-shifting, acrobatic best, unearthing the "moments of grace" buried under the detritus of our hectic, modern lives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374534813
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	10/21/2014
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

August Kleinzahler was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1949. He is the author of eleven books of poems and a memoir, Cutty, One Rock. His collection The Strange Hours Travelers Keep was awarded the 2004 Griffin Poetry Prize, and Sleeping It Off in Rapid City won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award. That same year he received a Lannan Literary Award. He lives in San Francisco, California.

Table of Contents

The Hotel Oneira 3

Lo Mein 6

A History of Western Music: Chapter 63 (Whitney Houston) 9

Tuq-Tuq 12

Self-Criticism At 3 A.M. 16

Closing It Down on the Palisades 17

1975 20

The Crossing 22

Exiles 25

Hollyhocks in the Fog 29

Hootie Bill Do Polonius 31

Rain 33

Snow 36

Epistle XXXIX 39

The Exquisite Atmography of Thomas Appletree, Diarist of Edgiock 41

To My Cat William 45

My Life in Letters 47

When the Barocco 49

Sports Wrap 54

Summer Journal 56

How Many Times 67

Rose Exile 69

A History of Western Music: Chapter 44 (Bebop) 72

When the Fog 76

A Wine Tale 78

The Rapture of Vachel Lindsay 80

Traveler's Tales: Chapter 12 88

Acknowledgments 91

Editorial Reviews

Kleinzahler’s first since his new-and-selected Sleeping It Off in Rapid City (2008) finds the peripatetic, polymathic, and sometimes dyspeptic poet in terrific form. He is known for his poems about places, and his native North Jersey shows up again here along with rail trips and midair realizations, the snowy battlefields of 19th-century Russia, a totally empty American town whose clouds look like “Outsize JumboTron screens,” a Denny’s (“Do you suppose, in the beginning, there was an actual Denny?”), and “Hollyhocks in the Fog” in his adoptive home of San Francisco—“red purple apricot/ solitary as widows or disgraced metaphysicians.” Stranger and just as compelling as these locales are new installments of Kleinzahler’s continuing series “A History of Western Music,” including onomatopoetic verse about bebop (“YAHTZEE YAHTZEE SWEET DEW-DROPSIE”) and a backhanded tribute to the songsmith who crafted hits for “Celine Dion, Cher, Michael Bolton, Faith Hill” (the poet’s second career as a jazz critic comes in handy here). Like the clouds and the travelers in his own poems, Kleinzahler’s temperament comes and goes—some will find it delightfully grown up, others unfortunately will find it bitter; his moments of tenderness, toward his own jaded self and toward strangers, come as relief. What stays, and what ought to impress any reader, are the range and the command that Kleinzahler has over so many flavors and kinds of American English. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Kleinzahler's music is not like anyone else's. His ear seems at times to have been shipped in from one of the moons of Saturn, and he hears possibilities in our daily language to which the rest of us remain incorrigibly deaf.” —Troy Jollimore, The Washington Post

“Kleinzahler's work, dreamlike yet savvy, is among the most delightful flowerings of American poetry in our times.” —David Wheately, The Guardian (London)

“[August Kleinzahler] might be the best poet in America, I don't know—I can't trust my judgment after I finish one of his too infrequent collections, high on its cartoon-jazz fumes. It's been five years since the astonishment of Sleeping It Off in Rapid City, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry in 2008 (and should have won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer), and, well, he's back . . . If you're unfamiliar with his work . . . start somewhere, for God's sake—you're missing out on one hell of a racket.” —Michael Robbins, Chicago Tribune

“Kleinzahler's poetry, like his name, is verbally lush, veritably cornucopian and always promising more . . . If there's a unifying characteristic to this ‘teeming,' verbally high-octane poetry, it's its ability to lean toward sentimentality without indulging in it. Memory, in August Kleinzahler's poetry, becomes a resource for reveling in words and proper nouns that might otherwise seem lost - for revivifying the dead both within and without the poet. And the poetry itself delivers bouquet after bouquet of lovely phrases, ‘profusion(s) of violets, turtles, snakes and cranes,' so that even if readers can't quite remember the lost world Kleinzahler is recovering, they can enjoy his skill, which is considerable.” —Aaron Belz, San Francisco Chronicle

“Where the acoustics of his poems are concerned, Kleinzahler is the model of scrupulousness . . . Here in abundance is Frost's "sound of sense," musically understood, as a poetic lingua franca . . . Things often look bleak in Kleinzahler's poems; but no inhibition need attach to pointing out how well these witty and enjoyable poems manage to turn out.” —Aingeal Clare, Times Literary Supplement (UK)

“Kleinzahler's first since his new-and-selected Sleeping It Off in Rapid City (2008) finds the peripatetic, polymathic, and sometimes dyspeptic poet in terrific form . . . What stays, and what ought to impress any reader, are the range and the command that Kleinzahler has over so many flavors and kinds of American English.” —Publishers Weekly

“Kleinzahler's poems amuse, challenge, and occasionally tease . . . his dark lyrics and mininarratives open doors to surreal, vividly rendered destinations that seem as real as any found in a travel agent's brochure.” —Fred Muratori, Library Journal

From the Publisher

09/01/2013
Reminiscent of works by American poets Kenneth Koch (1925–2002) and Frederick Seidel (b. 1936), Kleinzahler's poems amuse, challenge, and occasionally tease. His persona often emulates that of the solitary, noirish observer, recalling Rod Serling from The Twilight Zone—not caught up in the midst of life but rather existing as a wry, knowing presence on the periphery—"Who is to say if our friend is an epicure, a wastrel,/ or but a simple man, a paysan." And what weird, sharply imagined scenes they are—"the clammy darkness and floral decay of pre-dawn Pasadena," "grain elevators disappearing…like ships in a geography book," a strange hotel room containing not a Bible but "multiple editions of the one epistolary novel by K." VERDICT While Kleinzahler's more whimsical pieces, such as "To My Cat William" and "A History of Western Music: Chapter 44," aren't as clever or as engaging as their author might hope, his dark lyrics and mininarratives open doors to surreal, vividly rendered destinations that seem as real as any found in a travel agent's brochure.—Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY

Library Journal