Kirjahaku

The first three books by the author of "Into It""Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos" brings together the poems from Lawrence Joseph's first three books of poetry: "Shouting at No One, Curriculum Vitae," and "Before Our Eyes." Now in one volume, the poems from these three books can be seen as the work of one of American poetry's most original and challenging poets.

In "Lawyerland," Lawrence Joseph brings an unerring ear for dialogue, a cunning artistry, and a prosecutor's radar for loaded testimony to a series of rangy, irreverent conversations with downtown lawyers, making his book a uniquely fresh and insightful accomplishment.

Strikingly contemporary new work by an acclaimed poet Into It, Lawrence Joseph's fourth book of poems, is as bold a book as any in American poetry today-an attempt to give voice to the extremes of American reality in the time since, as Joseph puts it, "the game changed." Joseph's first three books dramatized the challenge of maintaining one's self in a world in the hold of dehumanizing forces. The new book finds him in a time and place where "the immense enlargement / of our perspectives is confronted / by a reduction of our powers of action"-where the word "wargame" is a verb and "the weight of violence / is unparalleled in the history / of the species." Along the New York waterfront, on a crowded street, at the site where the World Trade Center stood: Joseph enters into these places to capture the thoughts and images, the colors and feelings, and the language that give the present its pressured complexity. Few contemporary writers have been able to shape this material into poetry, but Joseph has done so masterfully-in poems that are daring, searching, and classically satisfying. Into It is a new work by a poet of great originality and scope.

"So where are we?" asks Lawrence Joseph in the title poem of his powerful and moving sixth book of poetry. Beginning where his acclaimed collection Into It left off, amid the worldwide violence unleashed by the World Trade Center terrorist attack, Joseph's poems--global and historic in scope--boldly encounter the imaginative challenges of our time: issues of political economy, labor and capital, racism and war, and "the point at which / violence becomes ontology, / these endless ambitious experiments in destruction, / a species grief." Against these realities, Joseph presents an intimate, sensuous language of beauty and love, "a separate / palette kept for each poem," a constant shifting and fluid play of sound and tone. With incisive intensity, intelligence, emotional force, and fierce, uncompromising vision, Joseph speaks from deep within the truths of poetry's common language. So Where Are We? is extraordinary new work from one of our most distinctive poets.

A selection of poems from the celebrated poet and lawyer Drawing from his first book, Shouting at No One, from 1983, and continuing through to his most recent, So Where Are We?, from 2017, A Certain Clarity provides a generous selection of Lawrence Joseph's "poetry of great dignity, grace, and unrelenting persuasiveness" (John Ashbery), each poem "an inspired, made thing by a poet-advocate who has honed a timely song within an urgent testimony that embraces the complex density of truth" (Yusef Komunyakaa). Joseph's poems constitute one of the most essential and visionary bodies of work in contemporary American poetry. No other American poet covers the territory Joseph does. His ever-new interactions of thoughts, voices, and languages--influenced by his Lebanese and Syrian Catholic heritage, his professional life as a lawyer and legal scholar, and the economies of the world of working-class labor from which he comes--bear witness, on multilayered spatial and temporal planes, to the velocities of global and historical change, and to power structures embodied in endless wars, unleashed capital, racism, and ecological destruction, presenting an ongoing chronicle of what it means to write poetry in the turbulent times in which we live. But also integral to Joseph's poetry is a sensual intimacy, passionately driven by an acute awareness of a deeper order in which beauty, love, and justice are indistinguishable. Meticulously formed, emotionally fierce, intellectually challenging, Joseph's poems press back against the high-stakes pressures of our time with a moral and aesthetic intensity not easily forgotten.

Praise for Lawrence Joseph:"Poetry of great dignity, grace, and unrelenting persuasiveness… Joseph gives us new hope for the resourcefulness of humanity, and of poetry." ---John Ashbery"Like Henry Adams, Joseph seems to be writing ahead of actual events, and that makes him one of the scariest writers I know." ---David Kirby, The New York Times Book Review"The most important lawyer-poet of our era." ---David Skeel, Legal Affairs A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation.Essays on poetry by the most important poet-lawyer of our eraThe Game Changed: Essays and Other Prose presents works by prominent poet and lawyer Lawrence Joseph that focus on poetry and poetics, and on what it is to be a poet. Joseph takes the reader through the aesthetics of modernism and postmodernism, a lineage that includes Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Gertrude Stein, switching critical tracks to major European poets like Eugenio Montale and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and back to American masters like James Schuyler and Adrienne Rich. Always discerning, especially on issues of identity, form, and the pressures of history and politics, Joseph places his own poetry within its critical contexts, presenting narratives of his life in Detroit, where he grew up, and in Manhattan, where he has lived for 30 years. These pieces also portray Joseph’s Lebanese, Syrian, and Catholic heritages, and his life as a lawyer, distinguished law professor, and legal scholar.

Praise for Lawrence Joseph:"Poetry of great dignity, grace, and unrelenting persuasiveness… Joseph gives us new hope for the resourcefulness of humanity, and of poetry." ---John Ashbery"Like Henry Adams, Joseph seems to be writing ahead of actual events, and that makes him one of the scariest writers I know." ---David Kirby, The New York Times Book Review"The most important lawyer-poet of our era." ---David Skeel, Legal Affairs A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation.Essays on poetry by the most important poet-lawyer of our eraThe Game Changed: Essays and Other Prose presents works by prominent poet and lawyer Lawrence Joseph that focus on poetry and poetics, and on what it is to be a poet. Joseph takes the reader through the aesthetics of modernism and postmodernism, a lineage that includes Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Gertrude Stein, switching critical tracks to major European poets like Eugenio Montale and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and back to American masters like James Schuyler and Adrienne Rich. Always discerning, especially on issues of identity, form, and the pressures of history and politics, Joseph places his own poetry within its critical contexts, presenting narratives of his life in Detroit, where he grew up, and in Manhattan, where he has lived for 30 years. These pieces also portray Joseph’s Lebanese, Syrian, and Catholic heritages, and his life as a lawyer, distinguished law professor, and legal scholar.