Recalculating

"I was wrong, I apologize, I recant. Originality may be the only course when loss is the mother of invention. These are not my words but I mean them."--Kenneth Goldsmith "Charles Bernstein's ars poetica is courageously resistant to the blandishments of what he calls 'personification' in its easy embrace of the unimaginable. This insistence makes all the more poignant and arresting, then, the abject misery of personal misfortune obliquely sheltered, honored, and given voice in Recalculating, a resounding collection by one of the true originals of the art."--Jed Rasula "Provincetown Arts " "The ethos and critique are of poetry, which becomes a rich dark with a phosphorescence of lyric as witness."--Mei-mei Berssenbrugge "Charles Bernstein is writing in the simplest of forms--so simple they become radical. I love reading his work because he's writing on the cusp of what poetry is."--Eileen Myles "Recalculating gathers a substantial selection of (mostly) new poems--a few go as far back as the 80s and 90s--in a remarkably coherent and enlightening collection--though I'm certain Bernstein would abjure both of those adjectives. He has always rejected the idea of the poem as honed and polished object, and the poems in this book are as open as life itself. One thing that Recalculating makes clear is that, though Bernstein can deliver some 'killer' aphorisms, he is primarily a poet of abjection. He has always been drawn, as he puts it here, to the 'painfully clumsy, clumpsy.' Slapstick is bunkmates with failure and even heartbreak. This is especially evident in recent poems such as "Recalculating" and "Before You Go" which directly or indirectly reference the sudden death of the poet's daughter. It is breathtaking--disturbing and admirable--that grief appears in these poems, as it does in life, alongside--well, alongside everything."--Rae Armantrout "The English word 'calculate' has a double life: in standard English it means to 'reckon' or 'intend' and in dialect it means 'to guess.' These contrary, wayward, definitions--the first so full of certainty, the second so full of ironic doubt--shimmer and clash on every page of Charles Bernstein's obsessive, brilliant new book of poems, Recalculating. Through responses, translations, adaptations, and occasional pieces, through little hymns and tragic litanies, Bernstein measures and dreams a circle: a community of readers and writers who spin within a world built from the living history of words."--Susan Stewart