Free Cell

by Anselm Berrigan

The second installment of the City Lights Spotlight poetry series, Free Cell is the latest collection from Anselm Berrigan, one of the most significant American poets under 40. Consisting of two experimental suites—"Have a Good One" and "To Hell with Sleep"—connected by the central poem "Let Us Sample Protection Together," Free Cell is Berrigan's most ambitious work to date, a spiritual autobiography wrapped in an exploration of form. His work combines the freneticism of his New York environment with oblique humor, political angst, and a reflective, lyrical interrogation of his own "For my part it's / been an honor / to be at someone's / service, though doing / so has diminished / my expiration date / and my astral self- / projection has already / fled in bitter tears / having used up even addiction."

Genres: Poetry

100 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

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

[juch]

i feel like a while ago i read another gen x-er early 2000s book that had a lot of anger, shame, objects, and office work in it in a way that felt very reflective of the times. i don't remember which one it is. here i enjoyed the bit / commitment, but really liked it when he was more transparent with feeling or attitude, i loooved the middle poem "let us sample protection together" that starts "when i was little i cut off the heads / of many lords." i guess that line also brought in a diff world

[Keith Taylor]

As I've gone back to this book over the years, I've come to think of it as one long poem. The poet finds a way to unify disparate elements by repeating the most common of phrases. It sticks in my mind. Here's a little think I wrote a decade ago:

https://annarborobserver.com/articles...

[Nicholas Trandahl]

Reading the work of Anselm Berrigan is like holding my breath from the first page to the end, riding that spiral of fractured radiant abstraction until at the bottom I can finally draw breath again, but everything is suddenly all new colors and seen in a new light. All three of these poems are tremendous, but the epic “Have a Good One” is a masterpiece, pulsing with bitterness, wry humor, and the occasional glimmer of hope in its serpentine body of nebulous chaos.

[City Lights Booksellers & Publishers]

"[Berrigan] digests and mercilessly composts an endless variety of speech, with an excellent ear for the comedy of the banal--the sounds of corporate brainstorming sessions, rich people, even the unsympathetic reader. . . When he writes `I like moving / your careful parts about,'he must be addressing Language, and reading this poem one gets the impression Berrigan may go on moving her parts indefinitely, as he follows the ominous momentum of these poems `Back to the brink, as ever.'" —Julia Powers, The Brooklyn Rail

"These are poems about getting by in the human universe through 'the icing of all personal / bureaucracies,' offices of existence where small and large injustices trigger passions within us that cannibalize us down to appetizers until we can regenerate in the company of fellow travelers." —Paul Killebrew, The Poetry Project Newsletter

[Matt]

I wasn;'t blown away by this book, but when I got into the rhythm of it, I really liked parts of it, esp some of the sections in "Have a Good One," as much as I felt like the shapes on the page were arbitrary.... Taking away the need to come up with titles frees Berrigan up to be pretty funny!

That said, the other two sections didn't do much for me.

[Rodney]

The socius blown through poet & getting its rhetoric high.