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The Banjo Clock

Karen Garthe author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:University of California Press

Published:8th Jun '12

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

The Banjo Clock cover

For Karen Garthe, poetry is a Molotov cocktail. A master of radical invention, Garthe combines brio of conception with linguistic virtuosity, bringing language to new life from the inside at breakneck speed. "The Banjo Clock", her second collection, cultivates a luxuriant sensibility even as it interrupts poetic continuity with cuts, ironies, sharp wit, and wild recklessness. In poems that consider poetry itself, Garthe writes about preparing the medium, the ink, "the motion of new utility". She then turns to America's psychic maladies and the need to rehabilitate our democracy, now floundering in the glare of TV's blue depressive light.

"Karen Garthe writes some of the most expert-and tightly-wound-lyric poems you'll ever read... If discussions of the sort Karen Garthe is performing in The Banjo Clock ... don't really interest you, that's okay: Just stop reading poetry right now, pick up your favorite beach novella, and forget the world's oldest form of literary currency still exists in any appreciable volume... What Garthe is offering today's poetry readers is a reason to read poetry rather than prose." -- Seth Abramson Huffington Post

ISBN: 9780520273160

Dimensions: 203mm x 152mm x 10mm

Weight: 136g

96 pages