COMMA FORK / MOVING PARTS by Ted Greenwald

Thrilled to be writing this blurb because I love Ted Greenwald’s poetry. It is extraordinary lifelike in its interlocking pattern and surprise. I mean like life, if life were a made thing, a homemade pinwheel blown askew and ridden to the front-stoop carnival where your friends work and you can talk about how your mouth feels when you fill pronouns from the dictionary. And how you don’t need the dictionary. Rearrange. The world’s so modular! Set free for a minute.

— Cathy Wagner

Two paths diverge (in syntax, shape, sound), and Ted Greenwald takes both, driving like a bat out of helix. In “Comma Fork,” thought gets taken for a ride: “Doublecross the mind / Double yellow lines / Pass where broke”–and it’s partly the swindle of that double that tensions these poems. This book is tricky. Nature’s unfixed, unfixable (“Nature, suddenly / Elastic utterance”), and speech naturally bends in the snow-drift / language-drift / lane-drift: “Say the show / Fork over the road / Looks snow // As they drift / Pile up.” In “Moving Parts,” it’s exactly that pileup that Greenwald sifts: “Look out / Front window / Scene piles / Blue Blue.” A view of life in pieces, and he makes his arrangements. Like the pop songs he sometimes cribs, “Moving Parts” is a trash-heap of musical speech, complete with the periodic audience-frenzying bridge (“Little bit softer now,” “Got to got to”). Though his geography says otherwise, in lines like “It’s been goodbye so long” Greenwald even takes a turn for the George Jones. And it’s as heartbreaking as it is hilarious (as it is mind-blowing), but the point is these are poems to get your parts moving.

— C.J. Martin

Whenever I finish a book by Ted, I immediately begin to anticipate Ted’s next book. Fortunately, BlazeVox has published these two works, COMMA FORK / MOVING PARTS, in one book. “Use your head/Feels good/The good work.” No one is writing poems that blend both the vernacular and the abstract with such virtuosity, no one is writing poems with structure and syntax that serves to recover authenticity under conditions of late capitalism, and no one is writing poems that sound better. “Begin with pronoun mouth/Wordy how it feels/Grammars fill ears/What’s that/Heard THAT right.”

— Stacy Szymaszek

Ted Greenwald was born in Brooklyn, raised in Queens, and has lived in New York City his entire life. During the course of a career that has spanned some 30 years, he has been the author of numerous books of poetry, including 3 (Cuneiform, 2008) Two Wrongs with painter Hal Saulson (Cuneiform 2007), The Up and Up (Atelos, 2004), Jumping the Line (Roof Books, 1999), Word of Mouth (Sun & Moon, 1986) Common Sense (L Publications, 1978), and You Bet (This, 1978) all available from Small Press Distribution. [photo of Ted Greenwald by Charles Bernstein]

Special thanks to Kyle Schlesinger

Book Information:

· Paperback: 294 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-096-5

$18

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See Also:

In Your Dreams by Ted Greenwald

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