Contrapuntal

by Christopher Kondrich

CONTRAPUNTAL by Christopher Kondrich Free Verse Editions, Series Jon Thompson "An understanding of the nature of consciousness reveals itself to be more elusive the longer one tries to approach it. The closer we get, the more vivid the confusion is. And this is the case regarding not only our handle on consciousness, but also the one we have on identity and even on reality itself, both of which depend upon consciousness-and all three of which, ultimately, prove more malleable than we might care to admit. They can be, and are often, altered by pharmaceuticals, self-scrutiny, the influence of others, one's own force of will, illness, and even just through our constant interplay with what we call the world. In CONTRAPUNTAL, an enormously ambitious and masterful debut, CHRISTOPHER KONDRICH has shaped this material into a work of such inventiveness, wit, wisdom, bravura, tenderness and beauty, it leaves me in awe. Or rather, it brings me back to a level of awe I had forgotten I had access to, restoring to their original size my hopes for what a book of poetry might accomplish. I am inordinately grateful for this book." - TIMOTHY DONNELLY "Before the book begins, the book begins, with contrapuntal "So I take my hand, / and even though I know my hand, / I know I know it, / it feels like your hand." Throughout the remaining books of this book, a singular duality continues to play, and it is a play of the body, of hands-"I can feel the sounds / between my hands / as I clasp them to play." In this latter poem, toward the end of the collection, the play on "play" and "pray" is especially apt and emotionally wrought, and-caught up as it is with music, with playing of sounds into emotional sense-such play is both profound and continually delightful. This is a book that needs to be known." - BIN RAMKE "Christopher Kondrich's CONTRAPUNTAL is an eerie world of dysymphony and desire, in which the actors have lost their way among objects and senses. Scraps of sound and thought float free, unmoored from belief, and suggest we find a way to bring weight back to the human world. This is a strangely comforting dystopia, pleasing to linger in, a place made of mood and novelistic smoke, the characters in it so clearly our own." - ELENI SIKELIANOS CHRISTOPHER KONDRICH is a PhD candidate at the University of Denver and an editor for Denver Quarterly. His poetry has been published in American Letters & Commentary, Barrow Street, Boston Review, Cimarron Review, Free Verse, Meridian, Seneca Review, Verse Daily and elsewhere. He lives in Denver.

90 pages, Paperback

First published December 10, 2012

About the author

Christopher Kondrich is a poet and writer whose most recent books are Tread Upon (Copper Canyon Press, 2026) and Valuing (University of Georgia Press, 2019). His poems appear widely in such venues as The Atlantic, The Believer, The Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, New England Review, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry London, and The Yale Review, and he has received fellowships from MacDowell and Yaddo. He is also the co-editor of Creature Needs: Writers Respond to the Science of Animal Conservation and an associate editor for 32 Poems. He is currently Poet-in-Residence for the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at the University of Maryland.

Reviews

[chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

I prepared for the recital
by clearing the path
of stray rocks, by
following my mind
like a nose from one
room to the next.
At times, I imagined
my suit walking around
without a body inside it,
just the suit by the window
trying to adjust its tie.
-- "I prepared for the recital"

Later, when I spoke
to the empty house,
I spoke about how
you were another person
entirely, which made me
think that there was
someone else who
might want to be me
as much as I did.
-- "Later, when I spoke"

I felt no air
from the blades,
but a helicopter
dangled its ladder
above my hands,
I didn't know i had
to look for it or that
it would be waiting
for me, the ladder
was an epiphany,
and when I entered
the body of the helicopter,
I found it unmanned
except for me and
the switches.
-- "I felt no air"

I thought if I could hear a longing and lilting melody
in one note, I could hear anything
-- "To be absorbed, which is what I want -- to be absorbed into the world"

Because the body is an
anchor I want a house
in the middle of a field
where the road that leads
in is the road leading out,
a place where I participate
in some unusual wonder
that lasts beyond mention
beyond reason, each day
the grass sways with it,
and I stay in that field
night arrives and I stay
in that field peering up
into the mind inside
the mind, then I shift
in value depending on
who thinks of me who
thinks ill of me.
-- "Because the body is an"

I've come to think of the world
as the mind's refrain,
synthesizing what we've done
and seen, but succinctly,
so that we can remember
as the days become day.
-- "Though you must linger"