A Book of Prophecies

by John Wieners

Poetry. Michael Carr is the editor of A BOOK OF PROPHESIES, a notebook by John Wieners written in 1971, and found in a collection at Kent State University. Assisted by an advisory group made up of Jim Dunn, Raymond Foye, and Charlie Shively, Bootstrap has made arrangements to publish this gem of history which opens with a piece titled '2007' that foreshadows the surreal and prophetic landscape in which we live--one that is positively past post-modern and pop culture.

Genres: Poetry

144 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2007

About the author

John Joseph Wieners (January 6, 1934 – March 1, 2002) was an American poet.

Reviews

[TinHouseBooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Matthew Dickman (Poetry Editor): If you’re looking for a strange and beautiful collection of poetry that might be outside of what you are usually reading, I want to suggest John Wieners’ A Book of Prophecies (Bootstrap Productions, 2007). A book of lyric poems, lists that become poems, and the sweet and tender (and wild!) mind of Wieners, A Book of Prophecies will get you through the first days of the New Year with new ideas and a feeling that the world is big enough for all of us.

[Carrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is devestatingly brutally heartbreaking, possibly really disturbing. Don't read this during your menses, before, or after. Maybe that one week where everything is kindof in equilibrium, but be careful.

[e · Rating 4 out of 5]

The strange leap into Cincinnati Pike’s world of Old Hollywood glamour & the terror of Boston asylums & coldwater flats, heretofore inexplicable & seemingly issuing from nowhere, now has its basis in this, a daybook of delirious transitions, some without conscious permission & others urged on by a commitment to the derangement of the senses. What can now be stated as the classic Wieners lyric sits here alongside dizzying fantasy, sexual frustration, desire to be another & yet nowhere else but here, tender eulogies to his mother & Charles Olson, & exhausted wrestlings with the memories of their irreducible largesse. I’d say this is for fans only, but if you’ve read Nerves (as reprinted in the Black Sparrow Selected) & been bewildered by the perpetually current reconstitution of Behind the State Capitol, or Cincinnati Pike & wondered where it came from, this is your Rosetta Stone. As well it should be anyone’s investigating the survival of the lyric through postmodernity’s ravages & tattering.

[Rusty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Indispensable for hardcore fans.

[Greg Bem · Rating 5 out of 5]

My head responded with the lightning of the journal, the tense of the line, individual, complete.

[Zachary Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Remarkable.