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Enacting both the pain and heightened awareness of a body in crisis, Joshua Beckman's latest collection of carefully assembled poetic fragments seeks to elucidate the synthetic reality of being sick and being medicated. Written from inside of illness and gathered over several years, these fragments or moments invite readers to contemplate how the compromised body transforms our conceptions of selfhood and our sense of the world. With a sincere reaching curiosity, the poems present a record of daily experience, but with the constant undermining presence of decay, memory, and death.
About the author
Joshua Beckman was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He is the author of many books, including
The Lives of the Poems and
Three Talks (Wave Books, 2018),
The Inside of an Apple,
Take It,
Shake,
Your Time Has Come, and two collaborations with Matthew Rohrer:
Nice Hat. Thanks. and
Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. He is editor-in-chief at Wave Books and has translated numerous works of poetry and prose, including
Micrograms by Jorge Carrera Andrade,
5 Meters of Poems (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010) by Carlos Oquendo de Amat, and
Poker (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008) by Tomaž Šalamun, which was a ¿nalist for the PEN America Poetry in Translation Award. He also co-edited
Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners (Wave Books, 2015).
Summary
Enacting both the pain and heightened awareness of a body in crisis, Joshua Beckman’s latest collection of carefully assembled poetic fragments seeks to elucidate the synthetic reality of being sick and being medicated. Written from inside of illness and gathered over several years, these fragments or moments invite readers to contemplate how the compromised body transforms our conceptions of selfhood and our sense of the world. With a sincere reaching curiosity, the poems present a record of daily experience, but with the constant undermining presence of decay, memory, and death.
