Testify

by Joseph Lease

With singular grace and musicality, these accomplished poems summon the voices of a divided country. With a storyteller’s rhythm, Lease braids humor, political bite, psychological intensity, and lyric beauty, taking us to a place of warning, critique, and elegy.

Genres: Poetry

75 pages, Paperback

First published March 15, 2011

About the author

Joseph Lease's critically acclaimed books of poetry include Testify (Coffee House Press, 2011; Finalist, NCIBA Poetry Book of the Year Award), Broken World (Coffee House Press, 2007), and Human Rights (Talisman House, second edition forthcoming). Lease’s poems “’Broken World’ (For James Assatly)” and "Send My Roots Rain" have been selected for Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology. "'Broken World' (For James Assatly)" was also selected for The Best American Poetry 2002.

Marjorie Perloff wrote: “The poems in Joseph Lease’s Broken World are as cool as they are passionate, as soft-spoken as they are indignant, and as fiercely Romantic as they are formally contained. Whether writing an elegy for a friend who died of AIDS or playing complex variations on Rilke’s Duino Elegies (“If I cried out, / Who among the angelic orders would / Slap my face, who would steal my / Lunch money”), Lease has complete command of his poetic materials. His poems are spellbinding in their terse and ironic authority: Yes, the reader feels when s/he has finished, this is how it was—and how it is. An exquisite collection!”

Michael Bérubé called Broken World “remarkably inventive and evocative work from Joseph Lease, one of the finest poets writing today.”

Lease was born in Chicago, and attended Columbia University, Brown University, and Harvard University. He has received The Academy of American Poets Prize, The Henry Evans Fellowship in Poetry, and Fellowships and grants in poetry and poetics from Columbia University, Harvard University, Brown University, and California College of the Arts. He is a Professor of Writing and Literature at California College of the Arts and a member of the Advisory Board of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.

Reviews

[Mia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book.

" O Captain, my
Captain, citizen, citizen.

Feels like. You killed someone or no. You didn't. You did. You're responsible, irresponsible. Didn't do it, can't remember. Feels like you might have. Might have. Killed someone. Won't remember. Don't want to remember. Don't want to be told again--

Try saying wren.
Try saying mercy.
Try anything."

What about the way he makes his songs slip? The mistranslations, the movements--in lines--of a longing hand? The stuttering? The interruptions in lamentations as though of a TV? Joseph Lease keeps saying the things that need to be said. And so tender-beautifully. Here's all the mourning I need, just now, and yes: the ongoing daylight.

[Donna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Smart, searing, masterfully crafted, Testify is exactly the kind of work that real readers long for: a book of poems that doesn't feel like it just plopped out of the workshop mill, that doesn't rigidly adhere to one or another literary "school," that doesn't play to its audience's dumbest impulses, that explores politics and history and language and our human responsibilities to one another, that makes readers so deeply deeply *glad* to be readers of poetry. Rich and expansive, this is a book to explore over and over and over again. Superb.

[Bradley Skaught · Rating 5 out of 5]

A masterpiece. With stunning lyricism, Lease explores the place where the political and the personal are indistinguishable. The passions and struggles of the spirit are echoed in the newspapers and in the streets, but where a lesser talent might succumb to anger or cynicism, Lease gives us many different layers of voices, rhythms and visions that provide depth and vitality. If it's the end of the American experiment, or its final karmic comedown, it's not without humor or love or passion or Spirit. Lease's command of language and his poetic voice(s) is masterful.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this powerful collection earlier this summer with two fourteen-year-old poets, who both loved it's direct treatment of emotion. Amazed by the ways sections take ideas through multiple iterations, a kind of tidal experience of language that seems very true to how identify functions now, into and out of a personal self, political and collective selves-- it's beautiful stuff. "Send My Roots Rain" is a personal favorite-- running through my head, the music of it.

[Eric Selland · Rating 5 out of 5]

We can believe in poetry again.
The poetry of Joseph Lease allows us to stand in the open of experience to borrow a term from Rilke, and with few words. For these words in their singularity and in their correspondences, their sheer possibility, hold an entire world behind them, pointing to a larger music.
Within a single note is held an entire symphony.

[Benmirov · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. Each poem feels miraculous and alive. I didn't read it so much as become involved with it as a matter of symbiosis. This book helped me live my life in the way only poetry of the highest caliber can.

[John Allen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fairly good. The singing didn't come across as melodic as he wants, but it's okay.

[Luke Hillier · Rating 1 out of 5]

Poetry's awkward because if you don't like it it feels like you just weren't smart enough or deep enough to get it...and I hope that's the case here, since many others seemed to dig this. Alas, I did not...at all. It all read like one jumbled storm of unrelated words most of the time. Esoteric to the point of being incoherent - I just had no idea what was going on 95% of the time. There were two pages I enjoyed, the end of "America" and one in "Magic."

[Jan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This politically prophetic poetry book made me think I should take more formal risks in my own work, but it didn't quite sing to me.

[Zack]

I'm a huge fan of Testify! What impresses me most about Joseph's work is his ability to inhabit a multiplicity of voices, often within the same poem. His poems are collages of strikingly different voices that all compliment each other. Sometimes spacey and airy, sometimes mean, sometimes kind and caring, sometimes sad, sometimes content and loving; one ever knows what to expect on the next page of a Joseph Lease poem.
I'm also impressed by the simpleness of Joseph's poems. He's clearly smart enough to use esoteric words that would fly over everyone's heads, but instead he uses simple language, language we hear everyday. The simple language gives Testify an intimacy that's refreshing in contemporary poetry. Joseph's tapping into specific emotions we all feel, and he wants us to understand what he's saying. The shortest poem in the book, "HOME SWEET HOME" is a good example of what I'm talking about…here it is…

Sky
Like whiskey and
Windows learn the
Sky
Sky like
Whiskey the
Sky and
Behind it
Lamplight

Testify is a book of honesty and extremes. Extreme rage, extreme sadness, and extreme love. It's intense. It's worth reading over and over!

[Gregory · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love poetry. I love being challenged. I love language expressly as it is delivered in poetry.

I did not love this.

[Luminous-texts · Rating 5 out of 5]

Revelatory. Sensorial. In the world.

[Les · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Inferno of our times.

[Stefanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Outrageous and real