At the Point - Massey, Joseph

. .

Résumé :
In At the Point, Joseph Massey's second full-length collection of poems, memory gives way to edges and angles, to Sound heaped/on sound, to spaces that make the shade/tangible as words arrange a place for the actual. Massey's poems are detailed and luminous, their nodes and clusters radiant. Light carves and bends, nudges and steels, dredges and etiolates. The eye in this illumined world is searching and unflinching as it surveys the microclimate landscapes of the northern California coast. But more than any environmental image, linguistic soundscapes hold sway. Massey, quite simply, has the surest ear of anyone now writing. A microtonal master, his handling of melop?ia is astonishingly subtle and precise. I find myself holding my breath as I read, the better to listen to the intricacies of echo even in the inner ear. -Craig Dworkin Joseph Massey makes me feel good about poetry. Here, the sun drums through, glazing the nouns, the names. Too much of our poetry is written by fools peering through a keyhole at the world. Massey's attention to the transient world give us whiffs of gasoline on the wind, paint cans filled with rusting rainwater, foreclosed houses, unspooled cassettes by the sides of roads. Drunkenness. Skunks, yellow jackets, and gnats. Clouds. The sea. The poet's commitment is to think through each word's particular weather. The Bunsen burner Massey's thought cooks with, to my eyes, has a hard, gemlike flame. -Peter O'Leary...

Biographie:
Joseph Massey is the author of Areas of Fog (Shearsman Books, 2009) and At the Point (Shearsman, 2011), To Keep Time (Omnidawn, 2014) and Illocality (Wave Books, 2015), as well as a number of chapbooks.His work has appeared in various journals and magazines, including The Nation, Western Humanities Review, Quarterly West, Asterisk, Verse, A Public Space, Tight, Carve, Northwest Review and American Poet: The Journal of the Academy of American Poets, among many others.Work has also appeared in the anthologies For the Time Being: The Bootstrap Book of Poetic Journals (Bootstrap Productions, 2007) and Visiting Dr. Williams: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of William Carlos Williams (University of Iowa Press, 2011).

Sommaire:
In At the Point, Joseph Massey's second full-length collection of poems, memory gives way to edges and angles, to Sound heaped/on sound, to spaces that make the shade/tangible as words arrange a place for the actual. Massey's poems are detailed and luminous, their nodes and clusters radiant. Light carves and bends, nudges and steels, dredges and etiolates. The eye in this illumined world is searching and unflinching as it surveys the microclimate landscapes of the northern California coast. But more than any environmental image, linguistic soundscapes hold sway. Massey, quite simply, has the surest ear of anyone now writing. A microtonal master, his handling of melop?ia is astonishingly subtle and precise. I find myself holding my breath as I read, the better to listen to the intricacies of echo even in the inner ear. -Craig Dworkin Joseph Massey makes me feel good about poetry. Here, the sun drums through, glazing the nouns, the names. Too much of our poetry is written by fools peering through a keyhole at the world. Massey's attention to the transient world give us whiffs of gasoline on the wind, paint cans filled with rusting rainwater, foreclosed houses, unspooled cassettes by the sides of roads. Drunkenness. Skunks, yellow jackets, and gnats. Clouds. The sea. The poet's commitment is to think through each word's particular weather. The Bunsen burner Massey's thought cooks with, to my eyes, has a hard, gemlike flame. -Peter O'Leary...