Atmosphere Conditions: New American Poetry Book - Perfect for Literature Lovers, Book Clubs & Poetry Enthusiasts

Ed Roberson works on a near prelinguistic level here: only essentials, as in essence or ephemerality - this last a dominant concern of the book traced through images of burning, ash, streaking meteors, dis/appearing figures and invisible but palpable personal histories. Strikingly, syntax seems to be inessential to communication, although many groping grammar-poor word clusters might leave readers feeling shut out of the deep well of private perception Roberson generates this work from.In his political/social poems, he seems to boil vast times & spaces of injustice down to several pages. Many poems here involve these themes somehow, but they are barely graspable in Roberson's idiolect. It's as though he's crushed all the blackness of pain (and vice versa) down to some scintillating verbal diamonds internally, then, with a further pressure, has crushed the diamonds into poems.These are not epiphanic or revelatory pieces as such: rather, you are swarmed by fragments of suggestive language, scenes "in parallax" so extreme as to extend weirdly into a warped version of our world - or, perhaps, a hyperaccurate version stripped of any distraction that clouds the sight. Reading poems individually is unsettling, but reading them as continuous phrases of the larger book leads to a slow-formed sense of settling in right beside Roberson when he says, "And, mammal, in the river sweat of these dreams/I float asleep naked on my back."This is how Roberson wants us to take him: in a stance of his choosing, in utterances given the urgency of what surfaces in that strange half-awake, half-asleep drift where sometimes dreams strike us with a purified truth.