Not Even Then

New California Poetry

by Brian Blanchfield, Robert Hass (Series Editor), Brenda Hillman (Series Editor)

Not Even Then, the debut collection by Brian Blanchfield, introduces a poetry both compressed and musically fluid, beseechingly intimate and oddly authoritative. Blanchfield conducts readers through a unique, theatrical realm where concepts and personages are enlivened into Continuity, Coincidence, Symmetry, and Shame keep uneasy company there with Marcel Duchamp and Johnny Weissmuller, Lord Alfred Douglas and "Blue Boy" Master Lambton, Juliet’s Nurse and Althusser’s Moses.

With its kinked and suspensive language, Not Even Then draws on the lyric tradition, even as it complicates that tradition’s dualism of self and other. Likeness is always under investigation in the book’s irreducible arrangements of alterity. From "Red Habits": "I imagine the interferences explained / in don’t-think-twice and reverse advice / and by habits for both head and breast / hers and hers as red as mine at chamber check. / We are each herself a further interference." No answer rests unquestioned in its turn; even the book title’s cynicism is challenged by a poetics alive to possibility, where Possibility is—impetuously, ecstatically—companionable. "The listener you are," writes Blanchfield, "the less alone."

Genres: Poetry

81 pages, Paperback

First published April 19, 2004

About the author

Brian Blanchfield is a poet and essayist whose most recent book is Proxies: Essays Near Knowing—a collection equal parts cultural studies and dicey autobiography, published by Nightboat Books and winner of a 2016 Whiting Award in Nonfiction. His first two books, both poetry, are Not Even Then (University of California Press) and A Several World (Nightboat), which received the 2014 James Laughlin Award. His essays and poetry have appeared in Harper’s, BOMB, The Nation, The Paris Review, Brick, StoryQuarterly, Lana Turner, and other publications; and two long sequences—one poetry, one prose—are available as chapbooks: The History of Ideas, 1973-2012 (Spork Press, 2013) and Correction. (Essay Press, 2016). A 2014-15 Howard Foundation Fellow, he is an editor of Fence, a guest editor this year of the PEN Poetry Series, and host of Speedway and Swan, a biweekly poetry and music show on KXCI Community Radio in Tucson.

Reviews

[Matthew · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sure, I didn't get it. But, I didn't really get Blanchfield's second collection of poetry and his collection of essays. Yet I enjoyed them. If you can't always get what you want, you don't always have to get what you read. This collection just felt flatter than the later work.

[Sarah]

I don't think I have the patience for this, perhaps because I don't remember what led me to pick up this book in the first place. Perhaps it was a recommendation, since my copy is autographed by the author to someone else.

[Zoe Crosher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Am not such a poetry fan - am INCREDIBLY picky. And yet somehow, he does it without overdoing it. Highly recommended.

[Aditya · Rating 1 out of 5]

They say when you revisit a poem, it grows in meaning. Till that time, it is 3 stars for this book.