The Barons

by Joshua Corey

Overview

The poems of The Barons span 10 years of struggle with the spirit of Romance in the face of world-historical catastrophe: 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Great Recession. Once again we find ourselves in a waste land stained by spectacle, scabrous and benighted, a landscape populated by opportunists, idiots, amnesiacs, and chumps, unable to comprehend the disaster that has enfolded them. In spite of this the book is haunted by the ancient quest for reconciliation, for some kind of contact with the earth and with other people. From ironic pastoral to black satire to the gates of vision, this book enacts a 21st-century journey toward an elusive horizon of meaning and the paradox of “freedom’s law.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781890650988
Publisher:	Omnidawn Publishing, Inc.
Publication date:	10/07/2014
Pages:	120
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

JOSHUA COREY is the author of three other books of poetry, Severance Songs, Fourier Series, and Selah, as well as a novel, Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy. He and G.C. Waldrep edited The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral, an anthology of innovative contemporary nature poems. He lives in Evanston, Illinois and is an associate professor of English at Lake Forest College, and co-director of Lake Forest College Press / &NOW Books.

Table of Contents

The Millions

The Millions 13

A Painful Case 15

Cognitive Deficit Market 17

It Goes by in Flashes, It Bows 18

Farewell My Lovely 20

Complete Adventures 22

The Novel 27

Words without Acts 30

Little Land Lyrics 37

Compostition Marble

Kiosk 49

Stylus 58

Marble 69

Hope & Anchor

Aboulia 79

Lecture on Modernism 84

Matrilineal 86

Yellow 87

Very Large Array 89

Le ciel des vacances 90

My Politics 92

Fathomcant 93

Son 94

Post-Secular 96

History of Flight 98

Sun In 100

Iphigenia / Beuys 103

The Barons

It's Its 117

Seek the Faceless Sun of Being 119

Clandestine Dead Animal Poem 120

"Though He Was Sometimes Insane and I Was Not That" 123

Material Witness 125

The Barons 126

Sæglópur 130

Acknowledgments 134

What People are Saying About This

John Ashbery

“Joshua Corey has reinvented the good old-fashioned American avant-garde epic poem (Whitman, Stein, Crane, O'Hara) and thrust it, kicking if not screaming, into the early 21st Century, ‘rescued/by what survives the will to survive.’ The result is thrilling, and unlike any poetry I know.”

Editorial Reviews

Corey’s work exudes a richness of language throughout.”—Laura Carter, Atticus Review

“Joshua Corey has reinvented the good old-fashioned American avant-garde epic poem (Whitman, Stein, Crane, O'Hara) and thrust it, kicking if not screaming, into the early 21st Century, ‘rescued/by what survives the will to survive.’ The result is thrilling, and unlike any poetry I know.” —John Ashbery, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the MacArthur Fellowship

“Corey’s The Barons offers us a rich, dense, allusive, elusive reading and writing of epic in an American key. In thinking about it as a set of engagements with regard to eco-poetics one may begin to think through the possibilities of empire and scale.”—R.D. Wood, Plumwood Mountain Journal

From the Publisher