Primitive State

by Anselm Berrigan

Poetry. PRIMITIVE STATE is a book- length tour-de-force from one of contemporary poetry's strongest search-lights. Composed as an homage to the list poem as "a catalog of consciousness-beats," the result is a long poem peculiarly perfect for twitter. Written across the fall and winter of 2008-09 as a continuous arrangement of deadpan observations, a comic reboot of the poet's writing mind, and partial portrait of the poet's then one year-old daughter, PRIMITIVE STATE is a work simultaneously spontaneous and exact, at once open-ended and satisfyingly immediate.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2015

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

[Tracy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book description is true to form - tweetlike observations. Funny, dark, revealing, cutting lines that encourage critical thinking.

Some favorites:

"You can point to the cost of food, but only if you can handle it pointing back" (8)

"Once I backed off my internal stance of disillusioned agony
and adopted a tone of unironic detachment I was able to
make her laugh several times over the course of a conversation
by simply relaying facts as I know them" (48)

"A bucket of hard cheese next to a spray can of easy cheese" (74)