The Up and Up

by Ted Greenwald

Poetry. A New Yorker his entire life, Greenwald's work always involves linguistic and formal invention. These poems stutter between linguistic strata, dissecting lingo down to the level of maximally loaded morphemes, combining these charged particles to initiate tonal, rhythmic, semantic, and syntactic permutation. The world in the work is a truncated world, one that is evidenced through the hyphenations, abbreviations, acronyms, and jargon of a glut of pop registers and conversational idioms. The poems share a formal structure and semantic strategy; working with dense word clusters stitched into longer paragraph-length units they resonate with the immense connotative possibilities of a few recurring units.

139 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004