Plummet

by Chris Nealon

Poetry. As with many books, description of Chris Nealon's latest, fails, yet in this case it also, unusually, falls. A few moments of demonstration rather than "nothing you read will help you now"; "I am not gay, I am from the future!"; " build your buildings so that even conquering hordes will be like, No way." Plummet is a post-catastrophic work written largely before the current all-American, i.e. global, plunge--imagine a kind of clairvoyant O'Hara distracted by Adorno, and Bear Stearns. It's that pit of the stomach feeling, when plummeting one goes from high to low--that's that pit of the stomach feeling--in the pit, of the stomach. "Will there be sirens? Toxins? I imagine violence miming reconciliation and then back again." The Believer reporter Stephen Burt observed of his previous collection The Joyous Age that "Nealon's bracing and bitter debut both enters and mocks the tradition of kaleidoscopic, difficult poetry as grand social critique, and makes most new work in that mode sound sloppy or bland by contrast." In other words, as it says in this new collection "Lifted from the cadences you know and then let fall.

Genres: Poetry

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like some evil-superman version of J Clover's "Totality." But also, a little more on the funny with less of the theoretical(which is not to say there is no theoretical) & just as good.

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

If a reader didn’t hear a little O’Hara in Plummet, she’d be deaf; if he didn’t see beyond that, he’d be blind. Nealon succeeds at updating O’Hara’s barbed glee in the Now with new supertitles for warlorn “ipodistes,” which is all of us pretty much now, wanting “Ecstasy instead of classicism” but with enough grad school to know what those options involve, and to chuckle a bit at the oldfangled either/ors: “Hold fast to your integrity until it becomes Art Song and you have no friends.”