Something for Everybody

by Anselm Berrigan

Anselm Berrigan’s eighth collection of poems, Something for Everybody, is exactly as its title describes. Wide-ranging in forms, densities, and aesthetics―and written from numerous collaborations, prompts, and influences―these poems express poetry’s astonishing possibilities. At the same time, they evince this sin- gular poet’s consciousness in the here and now, as a family and community member looking at the seams of public life.

For consciousness the world is décor: sentences cast about
For bodies in the exuberant wobble factory Q-Bert believes
In me in the dark to pass out and check yourself out gliding
By storefront windows searching for a feeling no one’s felt
In the last twelve seconds lathered with coeval nightmare
Rhetoric of sociable extinction bashful as a wraith eking out
A line of image extract to sprinkle on a plenty reeling mind. . .

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, Hardcover

Published October 2, 2018

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

[Greg Bem · Rating 3 out of 5]

This complex and sprawling book is challenged by its own capacities. Lacking cohesion doesn't keep it from achieving a formidable presentation of its messy, often-broken poetic genius.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Main lining NYC with every breath

[Harper Thomson · Rating 1 out of 5]

this book was definitely not my thing at all. i was super disappointed (read for GIANT books)