Come In Alone

by Anselm Berrigan

"For Brooklyn poet Anselm Berrigan, the political arrives in pieces, settling across his sprawling poems like dew or debris. Berrigan has always matched his experimental drive with a personable quality."—Michael Brodeur, Boston Globe

"Anselm Berrigan's voice continues be one of the most refreshing in contemporary American poetry." —Virginia Konchan, Galatea Resurrects

In Come in Alone, Anselm Berrigan plays with space like a painter with the prosody of a poet. Written as infinitely looping sentences around the page, the poems act as a frame to space, outrunning thought with quickness, openness, humor, and protest. They are simultaneously inviting and impermeable, making familiar language uncanny with every turn around the page.

pre-labor stress with all-star fatigue as day glo habit turning exquisite grime into corners

Anselm Berrigan is the current poetry editor for the Brooklyn Rail, and co-editor with Alice Notley and Edmund Berrigan of the Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (U. California, 2005) and the Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan (U. California, 2011). From 2003 to 2007 he was Artistic Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church, where he also hosted the Wednesday Night Reading Series for four years. He is Co-Chair of Writing at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts interdisciplinary MFA program, and also teaches part-time at Brooklyn College. He was awarded a 2015 Process Space Residency by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and in 2014 he was awarded a Robert Rauschenberg Residency by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. He was a New York State Foundation for the Arts fellow in Poetry for 2007, and has received three grants from the Fund for Poetry. He lives in New York City, where he also grew up.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Hardcover

First published May 10, 2016

About the author

Anselm Berrigan is the author of four books of poetry, including Free Cell, Some Notes on My Programming, Zero Star Hotel, and Notes from Irrelevance, and is the co-editor with Alice Notley and Edmund Berrigan of Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan. He is the poetry editor for The Brooklyn Rail, and formerly served as Artistic Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church. He lives and works in his hometown of New York City.

Reviews

[Simone · Rating 5 out of 5]

delightfully weaves between the sacred and profane with the ease of a hawk gutting a fish. illuminating!!

[Andrew Hart · Rating 1 out of 5]

*All quotes are verbatim!*

Interesting concept, but utterly pretentious. The text wraps around the outside of the page and each page is meant to be read in a continuous manner, kind of like the entirety of Finnegan's Wake. But when I come across such ridiculously inaccessible B.S.such as:

"I shit the magnanimous bed"

"stafucktus-like"

"necromancy's survey brains"

"for sale under hard core formica on time for the toddler evaluation sweat-science does halt"

"zebra stalls my favorite plastic pictures blooming feelings causing flab attack future no budgie"

... I begin to question if the author has any inclination to try to connect to the reader. In all honesty, there are two five star reviews on this, and I'm assuming these are positive because of the idiotic notion that "obscure is better. " Sometimes awful writing deserves to disappear into the void of nothingness, and this book is one of those creations. I took the time to read each page's cyclic rambling nonsense three times, earnestly attempted to find any coherent themes or imagery, and ultimately failed. In the end there is nothing recognizable in this, and it fails as a work of art. The impression left by reading this cyclical three times in a row:

"... A starry bunting, this rash owns finality less weapons, whistle blown through supposing a listening to breathing, crack break down transition, less extension, supposing, less transpaque, one does not control an army of imaginations, or ones do, suppose dignity, Less Conversation, control panels in on itself, they say this deal makes me felt, suppose subject's another says a cover, a tuck rule, a meditating zamboni... "

Leaves the impression that the poet is simply infatuated with whatever diarrhea streams out of his mouth and is content to slap it on the page without any editing whatsoever. I like stream-of-consciousness writing, and the impact it has on the reader. I was able to make it through Finnegans Wake, On the Road, and While Ginsberg's Howl isn't my favorite, it still has a lot of redeeming qualities. This is a cheap imposter of rotting filth, gilded with its typesetting to hide the pretentious unoriginalilty. I will not be reading anything by Anslem Berrigan ever again.