"Years I've Slept Right Through" comes from my first book, "The Milk Hours", which is in part about my father's suicide. The poem is an early one, written when I was still dancing around this difficult subject matter, not yet ready to write about it. In "Once a City Said," it records natural violence in the rural outskirts of Louisville, Kentucky, where I spent much of my childhood.
John James on "Years I've Slept Right Through" |
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A Review of Ben Lerner's The Lights
"In Lerner's works, we see how producing speech, an act we take for granted, has shaped the conditions of modern life, engendering precarity and wonder, paranoia and disbelief. These concerns are alive throughout his new collection of poetry, The Lights. In 'Auto-Tune,' for example, he writes in sprawling lines of the speech-shifting technology and its origins."
via THE WASHINGTON POST |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Brandon Shimoda on Other Arts
"Dot and I were sleeping on the floor. Yumi was in the other room. It was raining and windy. We hung a furin, a Japanese wind bell, above our front porch, and it was ringing loudly, sweetly. It kept me awake, in a good way. I was content to just listen, then lines of poetry, unremarkable but quietly unrelenting, came to mind." |
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