What do you think?
Rate this book
Where Thirsts Intersect
This is Anthony Seidman's second full length collection of his poetry which continues to span his vision of America with that of the rest of the Americas.
112 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published August 15, 2006
7 people want to read
About the author
Anthony Seidman
16 books3 followersAnthony Seidman is the author of On Carbon-Dating Hunger and Where Thirsts Intersect. A selection of his work was included in international anthologies Corresponding Voices in 2005, and Barco a vapor transatlntico. He has also published translations of contemporary American poetry in La Jornada, Mexico Citys major newspaper, and Revista Solar, among others. Some of Seidmans more recent poems have been published in The Bitter Oleander, The Bloomsbury Review; Beyond Baroque, Parteaguas (Aguascalientes, Mexico), La Prensa (Managua, Nicaragua),and La Reforma (Mexico), among others. He has a new book forthcoming in 2012 entitled Cosmic Weather.
"
"
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 30, 2016
Though his name wouldn't suggest it, Seidman shares many qualities with the greatest poets of the Spanish language: a surrealistic rendering of the natural world, a longing for reuinfication with the primal forces of Nature and an implacable, sometimes violent, presence of sensuality. It's little surprise that you'll see Lorca and Paz mentioned, but you'll also find references to Rimbaud and various visual artists of the twentieth century. These literary allusions are not merely pretentious attempts to establish continuity with his illustrious predecessors, but indicate the very lively and richly-textured style which scintillates throughout this collection.
Here's an excerpt from "Source":
Everything is water: milk, my spit, starch and bone, the blade slicing through a tomato's skin and the citron-tart bleed; even the hard sky of drought is water...Water is an oxygen I can't inhale. It beads my skin, licks my limbs when I splash through the heat of swimming pools with their chlorine-fumes smelling of semen. I have lost my taste of being pure oxygen and hydrogen, those power-cables crackling with whiteness when snapped against one another. I am too much mud and meat, while sharks encircling the ocean are cousins of my tears, henchmen against my blood, and conspire with water against my lungs.
This passage reminds me of another American poet of virile imagination, John Olson, whose extravagant and exuberant sense of metaphor confounds the mind and the senses in a wild festival of synesthetic delight. Likewise, at Seidman's best, the reader finds such evocative litanies in which the inherent contradictions of even the natural world give rise to an ecstatic realization of the continuous networks between all things, even those of dissimilar appearance.
Unfortunately, a good portion of the book grows banal by comparison in its poetic travelogues of Seidman's time spent in Latin America and elsewhere. It's all done very adequately and with humor and style to spare, but, once you see how effectively Seidman writes when tapping into the archetypal side of his poetic consciousness, the more place-specific sections become somewhat mired in ephemeral portraits of local communities.
Surprisingly the ekphrastic pieces, discussing paintings by Pousette-Dart, Soutin and De Kooning, actually leave more of an impression than a lot of the other material here. As evidenced in the previous excerpt, Seidman has a keen eye for the description of visual details and is very much the proverbial "painter in words." So it's no surprise that he's so adept at reading the silent language of visual art and translating colors and textures into words; this sensitivity to the image, along with a carefully-attuned sense of empathy, are best displayed in "Chaim Soutine's Self-Portrait, 1923".
Yet there is also love--the way the hair's
painted with sheen, kempt, as if Soutine
were consoling his simulacrum whose
lips quaver a grimace-smile, a boy
holding in the hurt, no sniffling. The right
arm & rest of body, folded from view,
snail slurking inside shell when fingers press
against antennae. Because the Chaim on canvas is
cautious; his ears curve forward to sniff
absolution for his Grotesqueness to
receive the anointment, enter the threshold
where the Self, once full of venom,
now brims over with mercy.
As the title attests, this collection concerns the elusive point where the still-unfulfilled longing for transcendence crosses the essential rawness of material reality. Seidman manages to meet this intersection of the physical and the spiritual often enough to keep the reader engaged, and he has certainly kept me interested enough to hope his next collection will arrive soon.
Here's an excerpt from "Source":
Everything is water: milk, my spit, starch and bone, the blade slicing through a tomato's skin and the citron-tart bleed; even the hard sky of drought is water...Water is an oxygen I can't inhale. It beads my skin, licks my limbs when I splash through the heat of swimming pools with their chlorine-fumes smelling of semen. I have lost my taste of being pure oxygen and hydrogen, those power-cables crackling with whiteness when snapped against one another. I am too much mud and meat, while sharks encircling the ocean are cousins of my tears, henchmen against my blood, and conspire with water against my lungs.
This passage reminds me of another American poet of virile imagination, John Olson, whose extravagant and exuberant sense of metaphor confounds the mind and the senses in a wild festival of synesthetic delight. Likewise, at Seidman's best, the reader finds such evocative litanies in which the inherent contradictions of even the natural world give rise to an ecstatic realization of the continuous networks between all things, even those of dissimilar appearance.
Unfortunately, a good portion of the book grows banal by comparison in its poetic travelogues of Seidman's time spent in Latin America and elsewhere. It's all done very adequately and with humor and style to spare, but, once you see how effectively Seidman writes when tapping into the archetypal side of his poetic consciousness, the more place-specific sections become somewhat mired in ephemeral portraits of local communities.
Surprisingly the ekphrastic pieces, discussing paintings by Pousette-Dart, Soutin and De Kooning, actually leave more of an impression than a lot of the other material here. As evidenced in the previous excerpt, Seidman has a keen eye for the description of visual details and is very much the proverbial "painter in words." So it's no surprise that he's so adept at reading the silent language of visual art and translating colors and textures into words; this sensitivity to the image, along with a carefully-attuned sense of empathy, are best displayed in "Chaim Soutine's Self-Portrait, 1923".
Yet there is also love--the way the hair's
painted with sheen, kempt, as if Soutine
were consoling his simulacrum whose
lips quaver a grimace-smile, a boy
holding in the hurt, no sniffling. The right
arm & rest of body, folded from view,
snail slurking inside shell when fingers press
against antennae. Because the Chaim on canvas is
cautious; his ears curve forward to sniff
absolution for his Grotesqueness to
receive the anointment, enter the threshold
where the Self, once full of venom,
now brims over with mercy.
As the title attests, this collection concerns the elusive point where the still-unfulfilled longing for transcendence crosses the essential rawness of material reality. Seidman manages to meet this intersection of the physical and the spiritual often enough to keep the reader engaged, and he has certainly kept me interested enough to hope his next collection will arrive soon.
January 11, 2011
One of the most exquisite books I've come across recently. Absolutely beautiful, breath-taking, invigorating.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews