Transversales

by Michael Gessner

The poems in Michael Gessner’s new collection, Transversales, are formally dazzling—incisive, witty, and smart—but compassion tempers linguistic brilliance. In a series set in Paris, for instance, a visit (against advice) to the “labyrinth of tented markets,” the now-dangerous Market of Seine-Saint-Denis, is punctuated dramatically by fragmented quotations from Victor Hugo’s diary kept during the siege of Paris (1871). Quite simply, I am hooked on this book. Gessner’s poems are glory. —Cynthia Hogue, author of Or Consequence There’s music of the mind in Michael Gessner’s Transversales, the investigating intelligence and haunting observations of a flâneur out of Walter Benjamin whose path time travels and intersects the lines of other alienated realities. A deft mastery marks these poems. “The Markets of Seine-Saint-Denis” is a kind of tour de force; a trip to the “home of the homeless” where both the past and the present “are eating the unknown.” I am haunted by his imagery, as when he evokes the rain as “the patterings of an unknown companion, lost and distant, now returned to wrap this house in sheets of itself.” I am struck by his poetic intelligence, as his lines intersect us with a sense of a beingness that is everywhere “political, which means the beast is in costume.” —Rebecca Seiferle, author of Wild Tongue

102 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2013

About the author

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...

https://www.pw.org/content/michael_ge...

Reviews

[Gareth Culshaw · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fantastic collection. One of those collections that needs to be read by poets. Mr Gessner has a way of structuring his poetry that you can learn from.