Rough Trades

by Charles Bernstein

Charles Bernstein is, simply put, one of the most influential and widely read poets of our age. One of the true masters of irony in poetry, Bernstein manages to also infuse each poem with an affirmative vision which verges on the utopian.
Bernstein is a poet of language, in the fullest sense of that word, a poet who "want[s] no paradise, only to be / drenched in downpour of words ..." In Rough Trades, language is taken in every direction possible, from the straght lines of jokes filled with pregnant pauses (George Burns) to the paratactic lines of a Hennie Youngman, and from the lines of Maoist thought to the lines of ladies's dresses which his father pushed — not downstairs in the stree but upstairs in a factory as the head of a dressmaking company. These lines of language, of thinking, intersect, dissect, converge, and emerge again as new ideas and emotions, hit and bounce and point and disappear over the horizon, only to reappear from the periphery.

Genres: Poetry

106 pages, Paperback

First published December 12, 1989

About the author

Charles Bernstein is an American poet, theorist, editor, and literary scholar. Bernstein holds the Donald T. Regan Chair in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is one of the most prominent members of the Language poets (or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets). In 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2005, Bernstein was awarded the Dean's Award for Innovation in Teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. He has also been a visiting professor at Columbia University, Brown University, and Princeton University.

Bernstein's highly anticipated new work, All the Whisky in Heaven, will be published in Spring 2010 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Also to be released in the upcoming year is a Companion to Charles Bernstein, which will be published by Salt Publishing, the winner of the prestigious 2008 Nielsen Innovation of the Year award.

Reviews

[Mitch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably my favorite Bernstein book. Plays at noir language, Charles nails it this time.