Sunday, June 26, 2011

The Sore Throat & Other Poems by Aaron Kunin

Fence Books 2010

She is a 
word I always,
without knowing,
had in my mind.
(The Sore Throat 42-43)

To underscore the habit and obsession of this book is to miss the point.  Drawing from a pool of about 170 words from a translation of Pound's "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" and about 200 from Maurice Maeterlinck's play Pelleas et Melisande, Kunin creates a rift of speakers fraught with disassembling a world's wanderings.  Ideas become questionings and gestures out of questionings become rat gods.  Sore throats hide words that we cannot say or don't know how to articulate.

Kunin toys with inventions out of what seems like madness, "everything, system, system/ you say is, kind of, everything/ a kind of, like a, you say is/ a god, the day is/ kind of, a god/ like, a god" but the this madness seems like a searching and wandering out of madness—Kunin shows how habits make monsters of us all.

This book is frenetically paced, but invites the reader to think along with the writer—this union between god and you and you and you is a spectacular fusion of desire; "You are/ a choice my mind seems to desire naturally/ as a word would desire a thing."  The relentless searching to find answers questions what we want and how we perceive it.  A perserverating ecclection of what we know and how we can rearrange our mouths in our throats.  Newness like wholeness, a recollection of memory and how we enact our missive eyes.

Don't miss out on this book.

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