Iron Lung - by Jim Goar (Paperback)

About the Book

Jim Goar's Iron Lung is a recursive, disorienting interrogation of language, ideology, and the mechanisms of control that shape personal and collective narratives.

Book Synopsis

Jim Goar's Iron Lung is a recursive, disorienting interrogation of language, ideology, and the mechanisms of control that shape personal and collective narratives. Drawing from three interwoven sequences, the collection loops through fractured syntax and dense philosophical inquiry, destabilising the reader's footing at every turn. Goar's poetry operates like a malfunctioning system-collapsing, reforming, short-circuiting its own logic-rendering a landscape where history, technology, and the self dissolve into recursive feedback loops. Iron Lung is a text that resists easy consumption, demanding instead to be deciphered, dismantled, and inhabited.

Review Quotes

Goar reifies the interconnectivity of our highly-plastic American iconography--seamlessly integrating cultural touchstones from Ozzie Smith to Richard Nixon to the Immaculate Conception--and in so doing succeeds at an even greater task: Penning a collection of poems brilliantly of and for its time. The Louisiana Purchase is a sterling exemplar of what post-postmodern verse can do in the twenty-first century.

- Seth Abramson, the Huffington Post

If one were to fall asleep some afternoon having just learned that John Steinbeck published The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (an adaptation of Malory) as well as The Grapes of Wrath, and then dream a braided dream of Okies pursuing the Holy Grail, and were Godard then to edit that dream, one would have something a little like this book's title poem.

- Paul Scott Stanfield, Ploughshares Blog

Jim Goar's third full-length collection The Dustbowl is compelling evidence that the legacy of the New American Poetry is alive and well. The centerpiece of Goar's rich and strange new book is the title poem, a 55-page serial work, which is reminiscent of the long poems of Jack Spicer and Ed Dorn.

- Michael Leong, Big Other

Goar's unexpected combinations make the reader see the beauty in the absurd.

- Spencer Hendrixson, the Rumpus

You should read this book. It's not the American story you learned about in third grade. It's the one you wanted to learn. It's the one that was always the true story.

- Dorothea Lasky

Goar echoes Edson's vintage id-twisting logic as he populates his Texas-Iowa-Disneyland with a menagerie of trespassers, including a genitalia-nesting bird, an elephant who lives under his house, a pianist with an itchy trigger finger, and a horse that is more Che Guevera than Mr. Ed. His clause-free declarative sentences are a perfect match for the edgy grade-school surrealism which guides us into emotional revelation.

- Scott Glassman, Rain Taxi Online

Jim Goar's book is squarely in the American grain. A radical re-imagining of the mythos in the tradition of Williams, Dorn, and Spicer (not to mention Max Jacob and Alejandro Jodorowsky), The Louisiana Purchase is a rich pageant of Americana.

- Jeff Hilson

Goar's ability to forge emotional connections between disparate characters and concepts is exceptional.

- Nate Friedman, CutBank Blog

The Louisiana Purchase signals a renewed project in poetry: to seek, perchance to find what is holy, and if not, make it so. This book is an instrument for being.

- Loren Goodman

It's the ambition of this book that really sets it apart from much recent poetry. It's tradition and life and learning shot through with the quirks of the individual.

- Nikolai Duffy, the Literateur

The landscape of the Purchase is at once thrilling, dangerous, and oddly comforting, like a nonsensical dream that feels profound, and where any misstep could have drastic repercussions.

- Shannon Wagner, Ploughshares Blog

Goar's brilliant portrait of life in a foreign city is made of such moments that melt and evaporate into others. It is an atmosphere we breathe, condensation on the windowpanes that we look through, rain we hear on the pavements outside. It is a perfect evocation of the misty ways in which we live and remember living.

- Anne McDermott, the Literateur