X =: POEMS

by Stephen Berg

Overview

In X=, Stephen Berg winds through the wreck of longing and loss, navigating the strains of curious beauty with flashes of electrifying clarity. Stripping bare the burdens of gnawing, unknowing fear, Berg has found his way into a voice of great energy and spontaneity, into a form of overwhelming urgency and detail.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780252070914
Publisher:	University of Illinois Press
Publication date:	08/13/2002
Series:	Illinois Poetry Series
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.30(d)

Editorial Reviews

"he gets on/ he gets off he gets on/ he rolls it out/ he lifts it down the steps," begins "Biker," the first poem of Stephen Berg's new collection, X=. Most often here, X equals a multi-clause sentence beginning with the third-person masculine singular and recounting loss, grief, aging, and desire from the perspective of a 67-year-old white man living in a suburban area-a perspective the speaker is trying to transcend, perhaps, in "Death": "he practiced for the day when it would happen by erasing himself by never using the word I by pounding his face with an imaginary hammer ears eyes nose mouth eradicated so he'd be ready." In "Phonefun" the narrator follows "I could slash my wrists in homage to Rwandan suffering" with "I'd rather get my cock sucked on the phone by an old girlfriend," alluding to difficulty understanding his aging, his fear of women, and the world's changing economic, racial, and sexual politics. Berg, longtime editor of the American Poetry Review, dramatizes the speaker's awareness of this difficulty with Zen-like detachment and provides no easy solutions.

Publishers Weekly

Like philosophical thinkers from Aristotle to Woody Allen, Berg (Halo), a founder of the American Poetry Review, frets over the unanswerable questions of human existence, metaphorically suggested by the unfinished equation of his latest collection's title. X= records one man's inward search for the meaning of his own life as he approaches old age, and so it's no surprise that it includes five poems titled "Death" ("he knew he would never face it until it came") and others called "Twilight," "Dust," and "Mortality." Though his subjects are given the post-Freudian treatment characteristic of the Confessional poets, Berg avoids their calculated hermeticism by infusing his "raw exploration" into the self with a stripped-down litanic momentum. Minimally punctuated and plainly spoken, these poems are mostly composed of blocks of declarative sentences beginning with he that drive each work inexorably forward ("he had read so much Zen that it was coming out of his ears did nothing/ ruined his common sense confused irritated infuriated/ he knew he had gone to it because of pain"). Though this repetitive technique might have been overused, Berg's skill and desperate zeal make reading X= a compelling experience nonetheless.-Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

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