Come In Alone

by Anselm Berrigan

Overview

"For Brooklyn poet Anselm Berrigan, the political arrives in pieces, settling across his sprawling poems like dew or debris. Berrigan has always matched his experimental drive with a personable quality."—Michael Brodeur, Boston Globe

"Anselm Berrigan's voice continues be one of the most refreshing in contemporary American poetry." —Virginia Konchan, Galatea Resurrects

In Come in Alone, Anselm Berrigan plays with space like a painter with the prosody of a poet. Written as infinitely looping sentences around the page, the poems act as a frame to space, outrunning thought with quickness, openness, humor, and protest. They are simultaneously inviting and impermeable, making familiar language uncanny with every turn around the page.

pre-labor stress with all-star fatigue as day glo habit turning exquisite grime into corners

Anselm Berrigan is the current poetry editor for the Brooklyn Rail, and co-editor with Alice Notley and Edmund Berrigan of the Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (U. California, 2005) and the Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan (U. California, 2011). From 2003 to 2007 he was Artistic Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church, where he also hosted the Wednesday Night Reading Series for four years. He is Co-Chair of Writing at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts interdisciplinary MFA program, and also teaches part-time at Brooklyn College. He was awarded a 2015 Process Space Residency by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and in 2014 he was awarded a Robert Rauschenberg Residency by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. He was a New York State Foundation for the Arts fellow in Poetry for 2007, and has received three grants from the Fund for Poetry. He lives in New York City, where he also grew up.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781940696249
Publisher:	Wave Books
Publication date:	05/03/2016
Edition description:	Limited
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	7.60(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Anselm Berrigan is the author of six books of poetry: Primitive State (Edge, 2015), Notes from Irrelevance (Wave Books, 2011), Free Cell (City Lights Books, 2009), Some Notes on My Programming (Edge, 2006), Zero Star Hotel (Edge, 2002), and Integrity and Dramatic Life (Edge, 1999). He is also co-author of two collaborative books: Loading, with visual artist Jonathan Allen (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2013), and Skasers, with poet John Coletti (Flowers & Cream, 2012). He is the current poetry editor for The Brooklyn Rail, and co-editor with Alice Notley and Edmund Berrigan of The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (U. California, 2005) and the Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan (U. California, 2011). From 2003-2007 he was Artistic Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, where he also hosted the Wednesday Night Reading Series for four years. He is Co-Chair, Writing at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts interdisciplinary MFA program, and also teaches part-time at Brooklyn College. He was awarded a 2015 Process Space Residency by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and in 2014 he was awarded a Robert Rauschenberg Residency by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. He was a New York State Foundation for the Arts fellow in Poetry for 2007, and has received three grants from the Fund for Poetry. He lives in New York City, where he also grew up.

Editorial Reviews

04/18/2016
Berrigan (Primitive State) dispenses with linearity in a perception-shuffling book that, on the fly, instructs its audience on how to read it. Composed entirely of margin-hugging, rectangular poems that can be read starting at any point and loop without end, this collection is a rare breakthrough in form. “I wanted to get hold of I,” Berrigan writes in words circling the blank center of the page, “put it in the center of the space ghost because there was no reason to put it a bit on the side, I got to the anatomy & I feel myself almost getting flustered I really could never get hold of it since I have no preference or so called sense of it.” Form aside, the language here will be familiar to Berrigan’s readers. Figuration, abstraction, daily life, politics, and theory collide without respite, as Berrigan’s alternately deadpan, ironically neo-romantic, and insistently heady tones switch on and off, phrase by phrase. What makes this book such a fascinating object is that Berrigan has conceived of a way for the physical book object to exist in a manner of which digital books may not be capable. As Berrigan’s language loops on, endlessly recontextualized, what results is a kind of commentary though form, the creation of an expanse through physical limitation. (May)

Publishers Weekly

Anselm Berrigan has taken it upon himself to write a book of poetry well beyond any conventional parameters. Come In Alone operates outside of whatever categorical box you might attempt to place it in, whether that may be classical or contemporary, academic or experimental. This is undoubtedly poetry but it’s not a book of poems in any conventional sense.
—Patrick James Dunagan, The Rumpus

The physical act of...turning around...the book to continue reading…emphasizes the role of reader-involvement through no less than the body. Perhaps the idea then of Come In Alone is to enter the book as a reader only to come out of it seeing yourself or part of yourself. The poem, after all, can also act as a mirror.
—Eileen Tabios, Galatea Resurrects

From the Publisher