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Prose. Poems.
This book plays with the idea of genre: the pieces collected within this book are prose poems, or, if you want--short short stories--and, collectively, they make a novel. The sections were originally published as the chapbooks Before I Moved to Nevada, When I Moved to Nevada, and Atlanta.
- GenresPoetry
108 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
40 people want to read
About the author
Jamie Iredell
15 books33 followersJamie Iredell lives in Atlanta. He is the author of Prose: Poems, a Novel, and The Book of Freaks.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
November 18, 2009
Three wonderful chapbooks collected together. A story in pieces. Pieces forming a story. If you like Jesus' Son you'll love this book. Iredell!!
November 5, 2009
(this review originally appeared over at OutsiderWriters.org)
As the title might suggest, somewhere between poetry and prose sits Prose. Poems. a novel, by Jamie Iredell. On its surface, a collection of first-person flash pieces that highlight seemingly random moments in the life of “Larry,” a veiled-named high school football star turned middle-aged suburban comfort lifer. His life is hardly remarkable. But the way in which Iredell describes it, is.
With each vignette, the loose narrative arc comments upon a consistent sense of foreboding, which perhaps goes hand-in-hand with the prose poem form (is there ever a hopeful flash fiction piece?). The story is never linear, though never jarring. It’s a mistake to search for linear anchors in the text, as the setting and even the characters are fluid. There is a sense of story that meshes with the reader rather than dictates to him.
The strength of the novel lies in Iredell’s ability to acutely describe characters and settings, with a poetic sensibility that is often simultaneous stark and complete. First a setting:
“Then the sun tripped over the mountains like a clumsy fat guy. Ants followed one another over the rocks. We sucked up deep, cool breaths. For a minute they seemed like our last. But, go figure, they weren’t” (pg. 61).
And then our characters:
“These women wanted you to touch them. They’d been objects so long, only human fingers reminded them that they had skin” (pg. 94); “…a woman with more piercings than skin. It was like fucking the inside of a gumball machine” (pg. 97).
Prose. Poems: a novel is a slacker story, but a slacker motivated to understand not just his context (where slackers tend to top out; Douglas Coupland’s Generation X) but himself within the context (Dan Rhodes’s Gold). And much like the latter comparison, Iredell’s story benefits from its entrenchment in a captivating setting, one that both houses the characters and illuminates them.
As the title might suggest, somewhere between poetry and prose sits Prose. Poems. a novel, by Jamie Iredell. On its surface, a collection of first-person flash pieces that highlight seemingly random moments in the life of “Larry,” a veiled-named high school football star turned middle-aged suburban comfort lifer. His life is hardly remarkable. But the way in which Iredell describes it, is.
With each vignette, the loose narrative arc comments upon a consistent sense of foreboding, which perhaps goes hand-in-hand with the prose poem form (is there ever a hopeful flash fiction piece?). The story is never linear, though never jarring. It’s a mistake to search for linear anchors in the text, as the setting and even the characters are fluid. There is a sense of story that meshes with the reader rather than dictates to him.
The strength of the novel lies in Iredell’s ability to acutely describe characters and settings, with a poetic sensibility that is often simultaneous stark and complete. First a setting:
“Then the sun tripped over the mountains like a clumsy fat guy. Ants followed one another over the rocks. We sucked up deep, cool breaths. For a minute they seemed like our last. But, go figure, they weren’t” (pg. 61).
And then our characters:
“These women wanted you to touch them. They’d been objects so long, only human fingers reminded them that they had skin” (pg. 94); “…a woman with more piercings than skin. It was like fucking the inside of a gumball machine” (pg. 97).
Prose. Poems: a novel is a slacker story, but a slacker motivated to understand not just his context (where slackers tend to top out; Douglas Coupland’s Generation X) but himself within the context (Dan Rhodes’s Gold). And much like the latter comparison, Iredell’s story benefits from its entrenchment in a captivating setting, one that both houses the characters and illuminates them.
June 25, 2010
I'd read all three of the chapbooks collected here before, but rereading them together made the text fresh. Each chapbook on its own enmeshed individual lives and moments in history and landscapes, and that's even more powerful here because the scope of time is extended. But I was also struck by the "reverse" narrative as the narrator heads east from California to Nevada to Atlanta, undoing manifest destiny as he leaves behind the wild west (and wild youth) for a slower, more settled life. Prose. Poems is a catalogue of decisions and of consequences met and avoided -- to have another drink or not, to intervene in a fight or let it go on, to drive down the far side of a mountain in a snowstorm or head back to town -- and the implication is that all of history, and all of progress, is equally dependent on those minor moments that may not seem like much at the time. While the present narrator is only suggested throughout the book rather than clearly established, there's a strong sense of looking back on life wondering how he arrived at what seems to be a stable position. There are also some really stirring echoes to remind us that nothing's so simple -- the recurrence of the Donner Party in the western sections, and the complicated racial history of Georgia and the South throwing even his "quiet" new life into darker relief. All of that's reflected in the prose, too, especially as the narrator actively, immediately revises what he's said even while saying -- replacing one description with another in the course of a few sentences, or starting a story with one point in mind only to decide on the page that it turns out to mean something else. So while there were a few points at which the stories of drinking, drugs, etc. became repetitive in a way they didn't reading one chapbook at a time, even the "banality" (perhaps too strong a word) of that repetition furthered the sense of every moment, and every word included or left out, mattering more than it seems at first glance.
March 2, 2010
"Arguably, other than the fact that Larry, the narrator, is growing out of football and heavily into drugs and alcohol, PPaN contains no stated, overarching plot and it doesn’t need one, because the reader, as casual observer of the events therein, will be pleased with the engaging, place-based vignettes that make up the book as a whole...."
Read the full review in the March 2010 issue of decomP .
Read the full review in the March 2010 issue of decomP .
March 2, 2010
I saw Iredell read from this book and his forthcoming Book of Freaks at a reading two weeks ago and was instantly won over. It's hard to describe his writing because it's so unique, but the title of this book is pretty sneaky in its accuracy. This book is written in prose but maybe they're poems and throw it all together and it moves like a really good novel. He could have maybe thrown in "memoir" into that title as well, because these seem pretty life-like. The last section, When I Moved to Atlanta, is especially vivid and brilliant.
November 22, 2009
Impressive union of interesting structural/thematic choices with heartfelt punk-rock recollections at its core. Deeply, deeply readable.
July 22, 2012
Very well-done. These little prosey poemy vignettes hit hard and made me smile.
November 6, 2015
Jamie's style is smooth like whiskey and smart like drugs.
November 10, 2010
Gorgeous.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews