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Similarly

C S Giscombe author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Dalkey Archive Press

Published:12th Oct '23

£16.99

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Similarly cover

Similarly four complete poetry books and a selection of new poems and sequences—samples the ongoing project of C. S. Giscombe’s long, long song of location and range.  In all the work collected here, location is a practice; range is the fact of the serial, the figuring of continuous arrival.

 

The writing speaks to rivers, the souls of city life, animals, the counted and uncounted, the many instances that might indicate “a shape to all that sound,” monstrosity and argument (the latter defined, with a hat-tip to Frankenstein, as “a thing that becomes terrifying to its maker”), and the colors of human migration, these things among others.  In the “Cry Me a River” poem, Giscombe writes, "for the sake of argument, say that the shape of a region or of some distinct areas of a city could stand in for memory and that it—the shape is a specific value because it’s apparent and public, and that way achieves an almost nameless contour."

From upstate New York to downstate Illinois to the western coast of Canada, Giscombe maps the back roads and rarely seen landscapes in places where Miami means a hometown river and Lakeshore means a long-distance train. These intricate and impressive poems create spaces for readers to hear that 'sizzle between the alliances' of poetry, race, geography, and history. An important new collection, and a must-have book for your shelves. -- Mark Nowak
Giscombe's Prairie Style . . . creates moments of coherence, but also welcomes moments of dissonance, when the expository eloquence of sentences and paragraphs just falls apart. -- Robert Archambeau * The Volta *
Here is a powerful, understated meditation on place, ancestry, and time.

ISBN: 9781628974379

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

352 pages