Out of Print: City Lights Spotlight No. 14

Description

The third full-length collection by Julien Poirier, Out of Print is a truly bicoastal volume, reflecting the poet's years in New York as well as his return to his Bay Area roots. Consider it a meetinghouse between late New York School and contemporary California surrealism, a series of quips intercepted from America's underground poetry telegraph, or an absurdist mirror held up to consumerist culture. "Welcome Julien Poirier! What a distinct inspired voice. His work is abundant in surprise. His musical,often bonkers play of language is, for me, a source of delight & revelation."-David Meltzer "Julien Poirier's poems calibrate the vernacular in a sublime mathematics of commonalities. The effect is that of feelings on the run, enunciated clearly. In a sudden down-draught-'You're wind, you melt on my tongue'-he'll take the contemporary love poem into new stretches of believability while knowingly calling to account the failings that, whether perennial or merely topical, hem round ourselves to disastrous effect. For, no mistake, Out of Print means business: a forceful wake-up call, allowing as how for this old world the time for meaningful action may well have run out and we've joined the fabled damned, lost but for such eloquence, affection, and mad, mad laughter in Hell's despite."-Bill Berkson "Out of Print's unexpectedly a love poem, its humor sharpening into dissonant pleasure. And what a pleasure! Julien Poirier's weirdly direct and directly weird poems notice what an event is, whether it's four square monks in a Coupe de Ville or becoming the Invisible Hand, and render that event into a sensual and searching landscape. You are really there, no where, but there, in poetry as a means to think differently, and maybe, absurdly, hope."-Karen Weiser Julien Poirier is the co-founder of Ugly Duckling Presse. He has taught poetry in New York City and San Francisco public schools and at San Quentin State Prison. Previous books include Way Too West (2015) and El Golpe Chileno (2010).

Julien Poirier has taught poetry in the New York City and San Francisco public schools and at San Quentin State Prison, and was a founding member of the Ugly Duckling Presse Collective. Previous books include Way Too West (Bootstrap Press 2015), Stained Glass Windows of California (Ugly Duckling Presse 2012), El Golpe Chileno (Ugly Duckling Presse 2010), and the newspaper novel, Living! Go and Dream (Ugly Duckling Presse 2005). For Ugly Duckling, he has edited such volumes as Jack Micheline's One of a Kind (2008), Steve Dalachinsky's In Glorious Black & White (2005), and two editions of Cedar Sigo's Selected Writings (2003, 2005), as well as co-editing the periodicals 6x6 and New York Nights. With Garrett Caples, he is the co-editor of Frank Lima's Incidents of Travel in Poetry: New and Selected Poems (City Lights 2015).

Poirier's poems have an attentiveness and intimacy and wonder that address all of us who naturally expect a poet to speak to us, but are astonished to discover that he also hears us and gives us a voice. What better reason to read Poirier, as his poems need us as much as we need them."-Benjamin Hollander, Boston Review "In Poirier's universe, the world is a stale baguette with goldfish caviar and moldy matchtips. Call it what you want. He hangs out behind the Kum and Go with Bob Kaufman, Bernadette Mayer, Richard Brautigan, and Henri Michaux and eats it."--BOMB Magazine "Never bound to a single or elitist aesthetic, the poetry's there for any one of us to inhabit. ... Like [John] Wieners, Julien avoids the pitfalls of literary self-importance, keeping his focus on building poems that liberate the reader momentarily, while never presuming to have a set solution. The poem is a problem the poet and reader confront for the sake of beauty."--Guillermo Parra