Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos: Poems 1973-1993

by Lawrence Joseph

The first three books by the author of Into It

Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos brings together the poems from Lawrence Joseph's first three books of Shouting at No One, Curriculum Vitae , and Before Our Eyes . Now in one volume, the poems from these three books can be seen as the work of one of American poetry's most original and challenging poets.

Genres: Poetry

192 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2005

About the author

Lawrence Joseph is a poet and a lawyer.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Reviews

[Sean]

20 years is a lot of poetry, if not a lot of pages. Really enjoyed the beginning, but it got old, as some big collections do, as it went on, especially all those Buadrilliard-ian hyperspeed globalization poems towards the end.

Two I enjoyed:
"Fog"
"My Grandma Weighed Almost Nothing"

[DilanAc · Rating 2 out of 5]

Earlier this year I read Into It, Lawrence Joseph's later collection. Codes, Precepts, Biases ... is an omnibus edition of his three earlier collections. You can definitely trace his evolution as an artist in this book and you see him building from more accessible but less skilled poems in the first section to much of the abstract, difficult poetry that is also found in Into It.
But somehow I can't access them. I think that there is a lawyer mind at work here (Lawrence Joseph's day job) that is so different from my mind that the poems just wind up being a cipher to me - a cipher that I can't even smell or taste.

[Zimmy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you! Finally (for me), a poet that captures the robust and transcendent potential of language, with real beauty, in an utterly charming and heightened conversational manner.