Flowers

by Paul Killebrew

“All my poet friends mourned when Paul told us he’d be going into law, so soon after he appeared on the scene as a supernova. ‘No fear. The blue light. My breath washing out in the air.’ Yes. He came out strengthened. Grown in imagination. Bigger in his lucid scanning of America. Rejuvenating. To read him is a delight.”
- Tomaz Salamun

“I ‘this is an anecdotal phenomenology’ and looked up the derivation of ‘thing given out.’ These poems keep giving and giving out; anecdotes evaporate and recrudesce in a different form, in new detail. Meaning emerges as each observation defamiliarizes the next and the prior. An epistemology punctured with an affectionate loathing opens out into love. Agonized, startled, startling wit. Truthtelling that fails because it’s truthful. These poems leave me alert to the floating world. Welcome Paul Killebrew, tabula rascal.”
- Catherine Wagner

“[Killebrew] plunges us into a world we inhabit but seldom notice, forcing its horror on us but also reminding us why we go on coping with it, why we’re in it for the long haul, wherever the carpool takes us.”
- John Ashbery

Genres: Poetry

75 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2010

Reviews

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love "Actually Present" which, incidentally, is reprinted in his new book with different (better!) line breaks. Here's an excerpt:

"My heart wasn't in it,
I think you knew even then, but I wanted
to rearrange thin bars of thought into a ladder-
like system of total devotion to the present
in its fabulous vanity. You were beautiful
to me, your lapel against your chin and the
orange light flinging itself from your mouth.
At the top of the hill you could see all four walls,
it was windy, the creemony was invested
with deepening resolve, reflection, amazement,
cast out of the boredom at the center of all things."

The best poems go beyond the sometimes hollow-seeming phrasing to make that hollowness a precursor for some kind of subtle revelation. Makes me feel like I should read more John ("Fucking") Ashbery.

[Cynthia Arrieu-King · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fresh meditations, the kitchen sink style lyric about an inner life not un-touched by what is rural. Would be an important mind-opener for a few undergrads I could think of.

[c · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lacks the coherence of the more accomplished Ethical Consciousness but keeps the vivacity, so you end up with a neon blur. This is most notable in "Forget Rita," which narrative stabs notwithstanding fails to be more than a number of above-average riffs.

[Greg Bem · Rating 4 out of 5]

I felt my insides lean like a tower of verse of experience the images sometimes slightly slanted or completely sideways.