Into It; Poems

by Lawrence Joseph

• ISBN13: 9780374175696
• ISBN10: 0374175691
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 2005-09-01
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Lawrence Joseph's Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos: Poems 1973-1993 will be published in paperback in September. He lives in downtown Manhattan and is a professor of law at St. John's University School of Law.

Table of Contents

In It, Into It, Inside It, Down In	3	(3)
When One Is Feeling One's Way	6	(3)
The Bronze-Green Gold-Green Foreground	9	(1)
I Note in a Notebook	10	(2)
Inclined to Speak	12	(1)
The Pattern-Parallel Map or Graph	13	(2)
Woodward Avenue	15	(4)
On That Side	19	(1)
What Do You Mean, What?	20	(2)
August Abstract	22	(2)
Why Not Say What Happens?	24	(9)
Ina Mood	33	(2)
Unyieldingly Present	35	(3)
News Back Even Further Than That	38	(3)
Rubaiyat	41	(5)
Metamorphoses (After Ovid)	46	(7)
What Is There to Understand?	53	(1)
A Year Ago This June	54	(1)
In the Shape of Fate over My Father's Birth	55	(2)
The Single Necessity	57	(1)
History for Another Time	58	(4)
That Too	62	(1)
The Game Changed	63	(3)
Once Again	66