Common Place

by Rob Halpern

Poetry, Queer Studies. Common Place continues Halpern’s sustained inquiry into the relations of body and voice to relentless militarization and economic depredation. Written in enjambed verses and impacted prose, Halpern’s language is at once raw and sculpted, passionate and analytic.

Genres: Poetry

168 pages, ebook

First published June 1, 2015

About the author

Poet, translator, and essayist Rob Halpern earned his PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of the poetry collections Rumored Place (2004), which was nominated for the California Book Award; Disaster Suites (2009); Music for Porn (2012); Common Place (2015); and [————]Placeholder (2015). He co-wrote the book-length poem Snow Sensitive Skin (2011) with Taylor Brady. In his work, Halpern explores the intersections of lyric tradition, with its prizing of voice and individual subjectivity, and social crises, including the conditions of late capitalism and militarization. Reviewing Music for Porn, Lukas Moe described how the book worked within Halpern’s larger project: “In their concern with crisis these books are timely and yet already late, compressing the language, time, and sensorium of the very recent past into a variable distortion of the present. They make a series, by definition unfinished, that is just recursive enough to go on without fulfilling its premise or predicate. Halpern’s poems bracket and cite themselves, often by means of the flat ventriloquism of italicized paraphrase. Sentences especially are spliced and interpolated in Halpern’s prose and prose poems, reflecting a tendency in his work to modulate between the less and more theoretical.”

Halpern’s scholarly work reflects his interests in modernist writing, capitalism, and form. His critical work has appeared in collections such as Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (2004) and No Gender: Reflections on the Life & Work of kari edwards (2009), as well as in many journals, anthologies, reviews, and zines. He currently teaches at Eastern Michigan University and splits his time between Ypsilanti, Michigan, and San Francisco, California.

Reviews

[Dawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

A sensuous and deeply engaged song for bodies: alive, dead, captured, dreamt, desiring, alone, sick, imprisoned. Using source text from Guantanamo coroner and incident reports, Halpern deterritorializes the subject/object into luminous and sweaty surplus. His project is racked with pleasure and fear, hope and loathing, but what a wonderfully vulnerable mess it is. It’s dense, overgrown and not unremarkable. (Below is quote from the end)

‘The best I can do is to say that I want my poems to be like sensory organs becoming "theoreticians immediately in their praxis" (Marx) making seemingly abstract relations perceptible thru concrete sensation and if these new organs can only be extensions of my particular body then I can only respond to whatever eros arouses my senses.’

[⏺ · Rating 5 out of 5]

"...the erotic always shares kinship with compassion [...] But compassion is not so easily won"

In a way, this book is horrible and repulsive. But there's also a lot of beauty and especially visceral emotion, and it's conceptually unfaltering.
You can order and read it here.

[Dennis Bensie · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poet used a autopsy report of a Yemini soldier as his muse. I am extremely impressed with his commitment to this collection. At times hard to read, but it never wavers ...just as I imagine war to be. I like the crisp suite at the end the best --To Burn With Love. Yet this whole book is a remarkable undertaking.