Rouge State

by Rodney Koeneke

Poetry. Flarf. Rodney Koeneke was born in Omaha in 1968 and grew up in Tucson and Los Angeles, and has lived in or about San Francisco since 1986. His book of history, Empires of the Mind, which tells the story of the British literary critic I.A. Richards, is forthcoming from Stanford University Press. ROUGE STATE is his first full-length poetry collection. "In ROUGE STATE, Rodney Koeneke puts the blush back on the demotic. His idiomatic montage is a careening screed dictated from a state of alert, all puns intended to turn the hose back on a culture run literally amuck, and whose marquee reads: Raw, Red, Rouge, Incarnadine. Welcome to these states!"-- Michael Gizzi.

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Rodney Koeneke is the author of four books of poems--Body & Glass (Wave Books, 2018), Etruria (Wave Books, 2014), Musee Mechanique (BlazeVOX, 2006), and Rouge State (Pavement Saw, 2003)--as well as several chapbooks. He’s also published a historical monograph, Empires of the Mind: I.A. Richards and Basic English in China, 1929-1979 (Stanford University Press, 2004). He lives in Portland, OR.

Reviews

[Mitch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pure gravy.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as Flarfy as Musee Mechanique but still full of glistening jewels buried in muddy abstract lyrics. Sample: "the moon's a moronic romantic/that's silvered my bathroom too long."

[Karen]

Suggested by Austen Erblat, Destiny Beck's friend, when asked about her favorite book read of the year.