About this item
Highlights
- From Matthew Rohrer (author of Army of Giants) . . . "Ben Gantcher's poems are located in a distinctly urban landscape that is at the same time a riotous natural habitat-because of course; that's how it is.
- Author(s): Benjamin Gantcher
- 100 Pages
- Poetry, American
Description
Book Synopsis
From Matthew Rohrer (author of Army of Giants) . . . "Ben Gantcher's poems are located in a distinctly urban landscape that is at the same time a riotous natural habitat-because of course; that's how it is. These poems toggle back and forth so deftly between registers-high and low, urban and natural, plainspoken and formal. The cacophony feels and sounds like riding the subway, and like riding the subway, these poems keep you guessing, keep you on your toes. The sheer range of THINGS in these poems makes each page a little cabinet of wonders."
Review Quotes
"The entire book shape-shifts beyond the template of text, because it's late and the need is terrifying-and aren't we and our books ghosts already? Visceral, humane, contrarian, often wildly funny or bracingly matter-of-fact, The Coronation of the Ghost is brilliant."
-D. Nurkse, author of A Country of Strangers
"Reading as Benjamin Gantcher puts all his heart and energy into imagining what holds the world together, I hear a sound like a song played by bees on a piano left out in the street in the rain-a music the notes of which land 'on the very / it seems nearly / late down beat.' That beautiful tune will stay in your head, making you attend to, struggle with, and marvel at the glittering, the highway, the lantern fly, the irate narrator. It means everything it is supposed to mean and it is so satisfying. Long live this Ghost!"
-Jordan Davis, author of Shell Game
"These impassioned, ingenious soliloquies are what Hamlet would have written, had he not gone mad, and had Gantcher's profound gift of negative capability. The pathos of this book inheres in Gantcher's refusal to close the door on others-including nature, ghosts, spirits, and the dead-and in his exacting, bravura animation of these 'voices / of the non-human world' we delight, becalmed, knowing that a poet of our time has made a way for us, and a 'keyhole of instructive light.'"
-Virginia Konchan, author of Requiem