Harm.

New California Poetry

by Steve Willard

This debut volume establishes Steve Willard as a true original, an artist whose kinetic sense of wordplay is deft, smart, and unfailingly provocative. Intended to be read in repeated passes, these poems are Cubist in feel, multifaceted in syntax, and brilliant in coloration. By turns disjunctive, narrative, plaintive, and disruptive, Harm. makes use of a wide formal range in reaching toward its ambition, which is nothing short of reclaiming lost human potentiality from current norms. Syntax flexes and the world is refigured, observed as if through a different camera's open aperture, drawing the reader to a new and transformative interior landscape.

Genres: Poetry

76 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 1 out of 5]

I’m glad I read this book - but not because I found the poetry as something that fed me. It was more the opposite. I felt like it made me think about how not to write (prose or poetry). The author has an interesting use of language that causes you to really think - but I could never find my way to what he was saying. While I’m sure this is mainly my fault - I thought it was helpful as I thought how to communicate so other people can understand.

[Bryony Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

'Because there is no question that understands me like you understand me, because quite outside differences of opinion there had been no way to teach this world full of world anything of value, although it appeared for a time that there were, and even then these artifacts and lost keys so easily findable, as all I had to do was listen then, blocks of coral fettucine solving themselves so even to apply an effort to undo them seemed unnecessary."