Dodging - by Charles Bernstein (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A new, expansive collection by one of the most provocative and inventive poets of our time.

In Dodging, Charles Bernstein pushes his poetics toward new kinds of formal and tonal attentions. This multifaceted work brings together comic velocity, pointed political critique, and passages of lyric intensity. Bernstein calls these poems "too late" written late in life as irreversibility presses against reflection, regret, and renewed resistance--a situation in which dodging is not evasion but survival, a way of moving through political catastrophe and personal loss without being silenced by either.

The collection unfolds in three interrelated "fits"--a term suggesting bursts of composition, rhythmic surges, and formal groupings--titled "Dodging," "Struggle," and "Reflection." These sections move from a series of flashes and fragments, then to assembled riffs and collaborations with poet Tracie Morris, and finally turn to refractions and aphorisms that embrace active contradiction. Together they trace a shifting field of contrasts: between satire and elegy, volatility and concentration, comedy and grief.

Both fundamentally true to Bernstein's voice and radically radiant in its range, Dodging is a work that moves restlessly across forms and tones--by turns sly, searching, and unguarded, where humor and grief occupy the same ground.

About the Author

Charles Bernstein is the author of many books, including the poetry collections Topsy-Turvy and Near/Miss and the critical works The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays and Comedies and Pitch of Poetry, which are published by the University of Chicago Press. He won the 2019 Bollingen Prize and the 2025 America Award for lifetime contribution to international writing. Bernstein is distinguished professor emeritus at the State University of New York at Buffalo and the Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006.