Selah

by Joshua Corey

"With Selah Joshua Corey joins a generation of exciting first-book poets (Jennifer Clarvoe, Joanie Mackowski, Cate Marvin come to mind) who apply the fundamental poetic gift of the ear, in new ways. Sheer richness of language, and in the best poems cadences layered like those of Wallace Stevens, guide the reader through Corey's extravagant, playful, fantastical and profuse otherworld." -Robert Pinsky

"Joshua Corey's book maps new territory in the indefatigable search for an adequate form of elegy. These poems meditate in a timeless manner on the terrible NOT at the center of death, but they do so to new music, one that embodies sly humor, formal invention, and rhetorical bravado. They are original, sophisticated and unabashed." -Mary Jo Bang

"Deep engager, Joshua Corey seeks to redeem what is 'singed' and 'wared' in us with 'the pupa's word. Dazzled weresong' ('man' song, a 'we're' or 'we are' song), one made strange from the straits of the problem. Through a ravishing compact formal beauty comes 'white sound crashing . . . on the shoals of . . . sleep.' He has gone so far into disillusion and aporia that he seems about to emerge out the other side, as through one of those suddenly wavering, watery space- and time-walls in a science-fiction film. What if it really is as he 'my mouth is full of his breath. / His tongue is in my mouth, and his name / is every body I see'? lift up! He keeps you hooked; he keeps you tantalized."-Cal Bedient

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

Published January 1, 2003

About the author

Joshua Corey is a novelist, poet, translator, and essayist. A professor of English and creative writing at Lake Forest College, he lives in Evanston, Illinois with his family.

https://joshuacorey.substack.com/

Reviews

[Jimmy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read and reread this book after the author took the time to answer a question of mine on Goodreads. Yet after all is said and done, was it worth it? I'm not sure. I got a better sense of what I read, but I can't say I would recommend the book to anyone. You would have to be willing to dig into obscure poetry for what end? I just don't know.

[Holly · Rating 2 out of 5]

There were a few poems I admired, but most of them were embarrassingly silly. One of the worst was "Echolocation Suite by James McNeill Whistler," which is about Orson Welles and Oscar Wilde, and relies quite a bit on notorious TV ads Welles did in the late 1970s or so for Paul Masson's shitty wines. ("We will sell no wine before its time" was the slogan Welles made infamous.) It also discusses The Third Man, a movie Welles made with Joseph Cotten, and actually includes the line, "What is Mr. Cotten's thread count." Lordy, no.

[Matt McBride · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book about language and loss and language as loss without object, where "every elegy [is] and edifice of sound / in which to live in glass". Both knowing and unknowable, it's a book of fascinating absences.