Jargon

by Brian Clements

All too aware of language's inability to reveal real answers or to calm the cold and hard world we inhabit, in Jargon Brian Clements nonetheless revels in the places where we settle into "language's sly do-overs," into meaning-communication, identity, the making of art, religion and its replacements, each other-hoping to emerge from the dark places of the universe (e quindi uscimmo) to see again sunlight. The prose poems in Jargon are haunted by the ghosts of form, rhetoric, narrative, argument-the cultural forms that make the world familiar yet tend to abandon us when we need them most (such as in times of war, or in times of economic collapse). Like its prequel, And How to End It (Quale Press, 2009) this book seems to rise ab nihilo in search of a beginning and an end-a cause and a purpose.

Genres: Poetry

132 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2010

Reviews

[Gerry LaFemina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Clements has some terrific prose poems in this book, dense meditations with lots of sound play, but there are poems in here, too, (particularly the ones the act as "section breaks") with smaller fonts, or floating across the page that leave me scratching my head and take me out of the experience of the book. Add to it the dense nature of some of the prose poems that remove the poetic rhythm from the paragraphs, and we have a book that I liked quite a bit, but less than I expected to.