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The Sleep of Reason
The Sleep of Reason plunges us into a macabre world where good impulses bring on evil consequences—a world not unlike our own. In David Gewanter's alternately delightful and startling poems, allegory comes alive and stalks a bookstore's musty aisles, comedians eviscerate their families for a laugh, lovers love each other for withholding affection, and theaters collapse on audiences hungry for spectacle. Amidst such surreal subjects, Gewanter's delicate musicality and keen sense of humor sparkle; his inquisition regarding a fallen world becomes a dark comedy of errors haunted by the most unexpected characters—from JFK Jr. to Tacitus, Redd Foxx to General Motors, Mariah Carey to 100 rabbits with herpes. An offbeat satire for an off-kilter age, The Sleep of Reason offers an incisive guide to moral behavior in an immoral world.
72 pages, Hardcover
First published October 18, 2003
2 people want to read
About the author
David Gewanter
8 books2 followersDavid Gewanter is author of In the Belly (Chicago, 1997), winner of the John C. Zacharis First Book Award, and The Sleep of Reason (Chicago, Fall 2003). With Frank Bidart, he is co-editor of The Collected Poems of Robert Lowell (FSG, Summer 2003). He was a Witter Bynner Fellow at the US Library of Congress (1999) and recently received a Whiting Writer's Award; he teaches at Georgetown University, and lives in Washington. Read more about Gewanter here: http://www.bu.edu/agni/authors/D/Davi...
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
June 26, 2008
This was a hard one to pick 3 or 4 stars. It would be more accurately 3.5 - there are some great poems in here and then some I just didn't get.
The ones I really really liked included:
"Gag"
"Revenger Sonnet"
"Jacopone: On the Cobbles"
"Redd-Pound Slamma"
And two chunks of poems that I absolutely loved, which is why it sort of pains me to give it only 3 stars:
Gag:
"when comics need new gags
they squeeze their families
for material,
squeeze till something nasty
pops out-: It isn't
cinema verite,
more like a steamboat
burning its cabin-planks
for fuel:
Should we call it art
just because real people
get hurt?"
Redd-Pound Slamma:
"Joe, laughing in
the city
of no name,
a preposition, 'The District of -'"
The two I would like to more know about are "Hocus Pocus," which begins and ends with Mariah Carey mistaking King Hussein of Jordan for Michael Jordan (I just couldn't figure out how these two parts related at all to the middle), and "Zero-Account," which Gewanter has dedicated "for my sister," and then proceeds to write:
"Kindness? 'Justice'
is how greed frames
every divorce:
cupid's backstabbing
alphabet."
The ones I really really liked included:
"Gag"
"Revenger Sonnet"
"Jacopone: On the Cobbles"
"Redd-Pound Slamma"
And two chunks of poems that I absolutely loved, which is why it sort of pains me to give it only 3 stars:
Gag:
"when comics need new gags
they squeeze their families
for material,
squeeze till something nasty
pops out-: It isn't
cinema verite,
more like a steamboat
burning its cabin-planks
for fuel:
Should we call it art
just because real people
get hurt?"
Redd-Pound Slamma:
"Joe, laughing in
the city
of no name,
a preposition, 'The District of -'"
The two I would like to more know about are "Hocus Pocus," which begins and ends with Mariah Carey mistaking King Hussein of Jordan for Michael Jordan (I just couldn't figure out how these two parts related at all to the middle), and "Zero-Account," which Gewanter has dedicated "for my sister," and then proceeds to write:
"Kindness? 'Justice'
is how greed frames
every divorce:
cupid's backstabbing
alphabet."
Displaying 1 of 1 review