A polyrhythmic and polyphonic "tour-de-force" that engages both with the constructed and the constructor--with buildings and architects, with music and musicians, policy and politics, the personal and the political, the dancer and the dance.

Attacking his subject matter with fierce precision, confronting the world on the same tough terms as an investigative journalist would, David Breskin traverses the globe in search of the conjunctions and elisions that reveal the world. His poems go into all the darkened interstitial spaces, and crack them and lever them wide apart: scary, open, free. "Welfare Reform" is about just that, as a monologue spoken from one very poor to one very rich, referencing North Korea, African tribal warfare, the holocaust, mortgages, ecstasy, Native Americans, tennis and dancing along the way; "Ugly Beauty" takes a Monk song title and goes at contemporary Social Darwinism by way of Cheney, Bush, "The Bell Curve" controversy, and Cindy Crawford's mole; "Newsworthy" looks at how our society commodifies "tragedy" to bolster the emotions of innocent spectators (with a special snippet reserved for Plath's ex-); and "Due Process" examines a schoolyard shooting from the POV of a mother who's lost her only child.

David Breskin first made his name in the 1980s and early ’90s as a freelance journalist, writing for national magazines, most prominently, Rolling Stone, where he was a contributing editor. After publishing a novel, The Real Life Diary of a Boomtown Girl, Breskin turned away from journalism and toward poetry, and by the mid-1990s had begun publishing poems in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Parnassus, New American Writing, and TriQuarterly, among other periodicals. His first book of poetry, Fresh Kills, was published in 1997, and his second, Escape Velocity, in 2004. His next work, Supermodel was a one-sentence epic poem, or novel-in-verse.

Breskin has also worked as a record producer for the past thirty-five years and, in addition to Frisell and Cline, has collaborated with leading-edge musicians beginning with John Zorn, Ronald Shannon Jackson, Vernon Reid, and Joey Baron in the ’80s and early ’90s, and continuing with Mary Halvorson, Kris Davis, Craig Taborn, and Chris Lightcap in the current decade. He lives in San Francisco. Most of his work may be found at davidbreskin.com.

PRELUDE

The Guitarist

3

(2)

Jumping Over Your Shadow Slash Landscape With Squeege

5

(3)

Growing

8

(3)

I ...EVIDENCE

Escape Velocity

11

(2)

Welfare Reform

13

(2)

Ugly Beauty

15

(1)

Newsworthy

16

(1)

Due Process

17

(2)

Mosaic Wipe

19

(4)

Just Asking

23

(1)

State of Affairs of State

24

(2)

Diplomatic Relations

26

(1)

Broken Country Scramble

27

(2)

Independence Day: Plaza de Armas, Cusco

29

(2)

Revolutionary Politics

31

(1)

Rated X

32

(2)

Leh Over in Kashmir: Alchemy of Travel

34

(1)

Freedom Of/Freedom To

35

(1)

Hush-Harbor (The Old South)

36

(1)

Battle Hymn of the Republic, 1860-2004

37

(1)

Pirates

38

(2)

Spiel

40

(2)

Edge City

42

(2)

Transformations

44

(1)

Today's Plane Crash

45

(1)

Waffles

46

(1)

Failures

47

(4)

II . . .WELL, YOU NEEDN'T

Capsized

51

(2)

Her, For Instance

53

(1)

The Jug Shop

54

(1)

Waiting For the Light: 10:48 Saturday Night

55

(1)

Angel Food

56

(1)

Alcatraz

57

(1)

Way Back in the Vanguard

58

(1)

Void Where Prohibited

59

(2)

Love Letters

61

(1)

Decisions

62

(1)

Sorry I Misunderstood You

63

(2)

The Grandmother Poem

65

(2)

Skylark

67

(1)

Guilty

68

(2)

Woman Trapped By Screaming Children

70

(2)

X Packs a Day

72

(1)

San Francisco To San Diego

73

(2)

Invitation to Move West

75

(1)

An Atmosphere of Isabel

76

(2)

My Prosthetic Everest

78

(2)

Belief Systems

80

(1)

Counting

81

(1)

Swimming Lesson

82

(1)

Work

83

(1)

Man, in the Middle of the Ocean, With Piano

84

(1)

For Daisy, On Her 13th Birthday

85

(1)

Proclivity

86

(5)

III . . .RHYTHM-A-NING

Literary Fiction

91

(3)

Millennial Curve: A Torqued Ellipse or Three

94

(2)

Industrial Facades

96

(3)

Days

99

(1)

Blank

100

(2)

S, M, L, XL

102

(2)

The Architecture of Implosion

104

(3)

My Favorite Things

107

(2)

Rusty Cage

109

(3)

Package / Packaging

112

(2)

If Books Were Like Paintings

114

(3)

Relevancy

117

(2)

Double Blind

119

(4)

CODA

Confluence Camp

123

(1)

Seeing and Believing

124

(2)

Verbatim: My Airport Taxi Driver, While Waiting For a Tow Truck, Takes a Stand on the Republicans

126

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