Cutty, One Rock: Low Characters and Strange Places, Gently Explained

by August Kleinzahler

Overview

Cutty, One Rock takes the reader on a wild journey by airplane, bus, ferry, and foot from childhood to early manhood in the company of a New Jersey family in equal measures cultivated and deranged. We witness scenes of passionate, even violent intensity that give rise to meditations on eros and literature, the solitariness of travel, and the poetics of place.

These individual pieces, most of which first appeared in The London Review of Books and won an international cult following, are by turns "poignant, surreal, down home and lyrical, a mixture of qualities that inheres in his language with uncommon delicacy and effect" (Leonard Michaels). Together they make up an intellectual and emotional autobiography on the run. The book's final section, about Kleinzahler's adored, doomed older brother, is unforgettable, and since its appearance last year in the LRB, has already entered the literature as one of the most moving contemporary memoirs.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374530181
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	12/13/2005
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	793,533
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.48(d)

About the Author

August Kleinzahler is the author of ten books of poetry, most recently The Strange Hours Travelers Keep. He lives in San Francisco.

Editorial Reviews

Offbeat, offhand, subtle, and unsettling . . . Longer acquaintance with Kleinzahler's verse brings greater admiration.” —Stephen Burt, Voice Literary Supplement

“Kleinzahler's writing [is] tied to an abiding sense of tradition, an inventive American idiom with daring gradations of tone, and an extraordinary range of lyric nuance.” —David Biespiel, Speakeasy

“August Kleinzahler is the ideal drinking companion, even if you don't drink, even if you're in another area code, even if it's Monday morning. His mix of comedy and heartbreak is sublime, and he can throw a sentence up in the air that will flip twice before coming down.” —Luc Sante, author of Low Life

“This is a beautiful book—mournful, swaggering, bleak, hilarious—full of piercing and often loving assessments of life and art. Kleinzahler's low characters aren't the ten people you'll meet in heaven, but meeting them in these pages is, for friends of feeling, a kind of paradise.” —Sam Lipsyte, author of Venus Drive

From the Publisher

August Kleinzahler's magical new memoir, Cutty, One Rock, is a deeply moving, unpretentious 155-page masterpiece. Readers of Kleinzahler's poems (he has published 10 volumes of them, most recently The Strange Hours Travelers Keep) will be familiar with some of his themes and objects, his family, his travels, his heterosexual adventures, his tragic gay brother who died long ago (aged 27); but if you missed these prose pieces when they were first published in the London Review of Books and elsewhere, this collection, which constitutes a brief autobiography, will come as a rich surprise. Only a mature poet could have written as lyrical and limpid a book as this.
— The Washington Post

Rick Whitaker

In these nine autobiographical essays, most of which first appeared in the London Review of Books, poet Kleinzahler (A Calendar of Airs, etc.) writes from the perspective that an "unfriendly room" is a "sanctuary." Kleinzahler was the youngest of three children growing up in a Mafia-ridden New Jersey neighborhood in the 1950s. His father had an "unpredictable disposition" and his mother "didn't like children, least of all her own"; thus young Augie was raised, "in lieu of parents," by the family dog. Such challenging beginnings have forged a complex voice, both bitter ("The entire nation sucking from the same teat, a teat with a Nike swoosh and dripping Diet Coke") and lyrically meditative ("the morning's first streetcar comes out of the tunnel before dawn... this is my rough carillon"). A few of the book's early essays wander, failing to strike a balance between topic and tone, but Kleinzahler saves his strongest essays for the end. In "Eros & Poetry," he uses stunning examples, from Chaucer to Dylan Thomas, to prove how love and passion "awaken us to the pulse of poetry and dance...." And the final, eponymous piece is a moving elegy to Kleinzahler's older brother, a gambling homosexual gangster, who, in the 1970s, shared his secret life with the author as if to gain witness to-and record-his brief but extraordinary life. (Nov.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Poet Kleinzahler (Green Sees Things in Waves, 1998, etc.) adeptly and frankly chronicles episodes from a strange, unenviable life. When the author was seven and his brother called him obnoxious, he writes, "I resolved to become a man of letters. If there were words as punishing as this, I wanted my quiver to be full of them." It is. Kleinzahler comes out of his corner at the reader like a veteran boxer: First there will be some jazzy entertainment and fancy stepping, then he'll send you a line that stings with nose-bleeding accuracy. We start with his childhood in Fort Lee, New Jersey. He was an unexpected baby-a little too much to drink and "mother became pregnant with me, years after she'd convinced herself she'd beaten that particular rap"-with a sister who lived in the attic, a brother given to mayhem, and parents who would rather be in another room. His neighbors were Murder Inc.'s CEO Albert Anastasia and the Palisades Amusement Park. His saviors were his dog and his brother, who figures in a final chapter that hits like a broadside. "He was born wild, born troubled," concludes the poet. "He wasn't designed for the long haul; not everyone is." Kleinzahler is good with unsettling, epigrammatic flashes, but he can also be mellow, pursuing the syntax of place on a bus ride from San Diego to El Cajon in a piece that proclaims "flanerie, that's my thing," or capturing his favorite bar, a depressing, cavelike, unfriendly joint called Persian Aub Zam Zam, in a profile that bears comparison with the best of Joseph Mitchell. Drinking provides the autobiographical segue to a thorough mugging of the movie Leaving Las Vegas, and it might also explain his penchant for fistfights and commentslike "what really drew me to Melodia . . . was her taste for being tied up and sodomized, all the while muttering prayers in Latin." High and low, crushing and comic, indelible as India ink.

Kirkus Reviews