Vivisection

by Eric Weinstein

"These elegant lines cut deep, not into bodies but into thoughts, thoughts about bodies, about the pain, shame, and delight of incarnation. For Eric Weinstein, poetry may be vivisection, but vivisection is, for him, metaphysical, an art of awe and understanding, where it is not so much poetry as our own contradictions that rend us, that appear to us, in these pages, with such an arresting tension, between galaxy and microbe, flesh and metal, living and dead. These poems peer into the dark." --Joseph Donahue

"Weinstein's VIVISECTION exposes the beating heart of its subjects with no loss of life: these remarkable poems are pensive yet urgent, allusive yet never needlessly elusive, grounded yet never sentimental. If this is surgical poetry, its implements--graceful precision, incisive thought, a meticulous accounting of the self's sacred and fungible parts--are wielded by a poet of significant subtlety and skill. 'I have a heart & so I know / how to make one,' writes Weinstein--and the reader who fully registers the tensile structure and pulsing warmth of these poems is inclined to agree." --Seth Abramson

"What is this quintessence of dust to me? Hamlet asks a flummoxed, completely overmatched duo pressed into the service of politicians, not more than a breath or two after he's exclaimed man to be a piece of work. As if in answer, Eric Weinstein launches VIVISECTION, this volley of vaulting philosophies. Here, the vehicles of body that give humankind its various and temporary residences are real, fragile, desirous, terrible pieces of work. In one poem after another, the hearts and the brains tough out another moment or month in their nearly involuntary quest to endure. But in the face of inexorable finitude, Weinstein's poems know and sing what we need to remember, what poems themselves remind us: that the brevity and transience that we might otherwise rue charges our existence with meaning. Detail by luminous detail, VIVISECTION insists on the value and significance of the vast co-op that is life, sentient and non-. In doing so, he implicates us in a sad and gorgeous summons to a world that we might otherwise only fear." --Marc McKee

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2010

About the author

Eric Weinstein earned his AB in English literature and philosophy from Duke University, his MFA from New York University, and his MS in computer science from the Georgia Institute of Technology. His poems have appeared in McSweeney's The Believer, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, and others.

His programming guide for children, Ruby Wizardry, is available from No Starch Press; his poetry chapbook, Vivisection, is available from New Michigan Press. He lives in Los Angeles.

Reviews

[Nancy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Loved the wren's beak lodged near the heart and the lovely conversation with the "diatomaceous folk." Heavens, I had to look up (or pretend like I knew) a lot of words and myth-names. oops on me. (Thank you, Josh, for the at-the-desk reading.)

[Lucy · Rating 5 out of 5]

10/10 would bang

[Kristin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A strong chapbook by an excellent poet. I especially liked "Field Notes," "Open Heart Surgery," "Panel on Borderland," and "Donor."