From Each Place the Body’s,
Ghost Road Press 2007
$13.95
Purchase this book from SPD
About the author
Aaron Anstett’s other collections are Sustenance (1998 Colorado Book Award Finalist) and No Accident (winner of the 2006 Nebraska Book Award and the Balcones Poetry Prize). He has been named the first Poet Laureate of the Pikes Peak region.
Description
Poetry. With a startling and often musical use of language, Anstett handles the grotesque and the graceful alike with the energetic logic of the body–one of physicality, circulation, and surprise. “Aaron Anstett has a unique talent for dislocating language into meaning, and he accomplishes this most often through the body’s exhaustive task of flesh, though ‘beyond it’s umpteen miseries, / enduring uproar in our skins so keen / it cannot be rendered, what we a capella say / all vowel and glottal stop.’ His raised voice is far-reaching and memorable.” Anstett’s other collections are Sustenance (1998 Colorado Book Award Finalist) and No Accident (winner of the 2006 Nebraska Book Award and the Balcones Poetry Prize).
Blurbs
“Aaron Anstett has a unique talent for dislocating language into meaning, and he accomplishes this most often through the body’s exhaustive task of fl esh, though ‘beyond its umpteen miseries, / enduring uproar in our skins so keen / it cannot be rendered, what we a capella say / all vowel and glottal stop.’ His raised voice is far-reaching and memorable.” —Mark Irwin, author of Bright Hunger“Like a court jester in an American tragedy, Aaron Anstett throws the crazy logic of our world back in our faces, knowing ‘one’s vision’s given to wild inaccuracies.’ He’s a gifted misfi t citizen who shocks the language back into life. Yet it’s the accuracy of poem after poem in this collection that makes me think Anstett is one of our wittiest and most necessary voices. Read him.” —David Mason, author of Arrivals and Ludlow
“The startling, ecstatic music that circulates through Aaron Anstett’s collection starts in the fi rst stanza of the fi rst poem, which watches and hears ‘fi eld mice scurry on snow, / script of their paw prints unscrolled.’ Such music invokes and evokes spirits, starting there with Burns and Clare, ending with Omar Khayyam, when Anstett’s speaker’s second self pounds at the door of a bar, pleading (as Anstett’s work does) for us all: ‘Open / the door. It’s tomorrow already.’” —H.L. Hix, author of Chromatic
“As this collection shows, Aaron Anstett is writing better poems than I am, so by rights he should be doing blurbs for me, not me him. In truth that’s not much of a recommendation, so forgive the incongruity when I say to you the potential reader that I hope you will enjoy reading this book as much as I did.” —Bill Knott, author of Stigmata Errata Etcetera
Media Writeups
AGAINST THE FILIBUSTER WIND
for Rebecca Laroche
A kind of circus, intersection birds
dare-deviling traffic in the skeletal
big tent, architecture sketch four slung
stoplight wires suggest, boundary the birds,
zooming and looping over asphalt, near-misses
frantically acrobatic, will not transgress.
Tiny insects pilgrimage in each joist’s darkened chapel.
And what of the eyelashes
as that knucklehead, my heart,
bosses the blood around
with its idiot command,
Right now, right now?
Or atoms? Trap
doors? Trapezes?
