The Hotel Oneira

by August Kleinzahler

Kleinzahler's poetry is, as ever, concerned with voices, places, the real and the dreamed, the present and the past, colliding and intersecting and spilling over into each other. Whether the voice embodied is that of 'an adult male of late middle age, // about to weep among the avocados and citrus fruits / in a vast, overlit room next to a bosomy Cuban grandma' as in 'Whitney Houston' or that of the title character in 'Hootie Bill Do Polonius' who is bidding 'adios compadre // To a most galuptious scene Kid', Kleinzahler locates and exhibits in his poetry the human heart at the core of lived experience. This is a poet searching for - and finding - a cadence capable of describing life as it is lived today.Kleinzahler's poetry is, as noted in the judges' citation for the 2004 Griffin Poetry Prize (which he won for his collection The Strange Hours Travelers Keep ), 'ferociously on the move, between locations, between forms, between registers.' The Hotel Oneira finds Kleinzahler at his shape-shifting, acrobatic best, unearthing the 'moments of grace' buried amongst the detritus of our hectic, modern lives.

Genres: Poetry, American

79 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2013

About the author

August Kleinzahler was born in Jersey City in 1949. He is the author of eleven books of poems and a memoir, "Cutty, One Rock." His collection "The Strange Hours Travelers Keep" was awarded the 2004 Griffin Poetry Prize, and "Sleeping It Off in Rapid City" won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award. That same year he received a Lannan Literary Award. His new collection, "The Hotel Oneira," will be published by FSG October 1st, 2013. He lives in San Francisco.

Reviews

[Liam Branaghan · Rating 2 out of 5]

A few excellent poems, many that I just didn’t connect with. I’ll come back to this someday.

[Austėja · Rating 3 out of 5]

definitely a 3.5! equal parts lovely and chaotic

[TinHouseBooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Molly Dickinson (Editorial Intern, Tin House Books): August Kleinzahler’s collection The Strange Hours Travelers Keep was one of the first poetry collections I read as an eager high school student that understood the world as I did: a place of overwhelming modernity, a sometimes unbearable expanse of stimulus and over stimulus. What instead marks Kleinzahler’s new collection, The Hotel Oneira, is a notable quietness and a steadied focus on moments of stillness, absence, tenderness. In Strange Hours we were caught up in the urgency to capture the anomalies of awkward hours and the awkward peoples who inhabit them, in Hotel Oneira we are the calmed traveler, settled in and calmed by the environment we suddenly discover ourselves in. I feel both great nostalgia and fresh thrill upon reading this collection. Kleinzahler’s shifting perspective is strongly apparent yet he remains an astounding manipulator of the English language.

[Michael Vagnetti · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is a small pocket that forms in the cheeks of a person who is well-travelled in humor. A wink of the jowls; a passport stamp. This writing is like a coarse transfer of that infolding. This is a book of destinations, prepositions, and "heavy freight." Words are like imprints of aggregate trodding.

It is a husky and limber combo, and allusive ("Door ajar to the great actress's cabana at Nazimova's Garden of Allah"). It is jangly, jonesing, and Jersey.

My favorite is "Hollyhocks in the Fog." It is over 30 years old, but contemporary. A black bus rolls through; it transports Google employees. Imagination clashes poetry in a spectre of content overabundant meta-Flarf. This poem also expresses one of my favorite sentiments, those words that summon a special kind of nausea: "There is nothing further to be known."

[Mauberley]

What I find most appealing about this book is its pervasive sense of dislocation met with bemusement rather anxiety. I recognize a world where Strauss, Adorno, and Ethel Merman are all invoked in a poem that describes a parade in Pasadena that follows 'exactly the parade route of the celebrated Tournament of Roses' ('Rose Exile'). And it isn't just me - you too know what it is to go grocery shopping to the sounds of 'Celine Dion, Cher, Michael Bolton, Faith Hill, Toni Braxton' with a cart 'filled with eggs,/ cookies, 90 fl. oz. containers of anti-bacterial dishwashing liquid' ('A History of Western Music: Chapter 63 (Whitney Huston)'). It's a world with which so many of us are familiar and how fortunate we are to have it rendered for us in Kleinzahler's wise and artful poetry.

[Patti K · Rating 3 out of 5]

This new book of poems by Kleinzahler is a bit of a stretch. His many registers of
tone and vocabulary are sometimes fun, but his experimental poems I found weirdly
unreadable. There is a fantastic fable called the Tuq Tuq Tree that left me cold.
However his poem on Vachel Lindsay's poetic career was rollicking inviting with a
nod to Frank O'Hara. He is a man of the lonely hotel room with its neon sign, the
dark humors of daily living, which gives him a special niche in today's poetry.
Some poems are good, while others did not reach me.

[Simeon Berry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kleinzahler elevates the travelogue into perfect, isometric tension here, partaking equally of the rueful satisfaction of Jack Gilbert’s in-house exile and Kenneth Patchen’s chance encounters with the ridiculous (but real) crimes of the imagination. With the stuttering symmetry of a bebop sensibility and a smartly-deferred fervency, The Hotel Oneira is an elegant ledger of doubt and regret.

[willowdog · Rating 2 out of 5]

Accomplished writer, accomplished poetry. No gay content---maybe two poems.

[Eric Steere · Rating 4 out of 5]

More delightfully greasy lyrics from contemporary American poet and Jersey native, delicious and intoxicating like subterranean Cantonese kitchens in the wee hours of a summer night downtown.