For Days by Adam Strauss

Of For Days Adam Strauss writes that these poems record “what happens when ongoingness, dailiness, is mixed with highly wrought/overdetermining elements, and hence the use (abuse?) of the pantoum, sonnets, and terza rima.” That’s a fair description, but what’s missing in that little modus operandi but present in the work itself is the music of alliteration, assonance and rhyme schemes falling apart under the pressure of faux pedestrianism. Read Days as daze, the pedestrian almost falling off the sidewalk, or stumbling over the graves of Shakespeare, Dante and Petrarch, to say nothing of Ashbery, Koch and O’Hara. Think New Formalism under deconstruction, “My Favorite Things” as revamped by Monk instead of Coltrane.

—Tyrone Williams

Formally wild, For Days is a kind of chain reaction of circulating imagery and sound, a kind of call and response inside the daily life of self and world. The book teeters on the “verbena laden verge” that’s vamped and revamped again and again. I love how Strauss messes with traditional forms until they overflow with sequins.

—Sandra Simonds

Adam Strauss’ marvelous For Days digs deeply into the organic possibilities of prescribed form. Page by page, these poems are mother and child of each other. A master of surfaces, Strauss artfully proves that poetry’s ever evolving origins comes from asking “established answers new questions/To arrive at innocent unknowing.”” The loving attention he pays to the surface of the already written world proves that beauty is still possible for you who “concentrate on where you’re going/In order that you might be blown away…” An impressive debut.

—Claudia Keelan

Adam Strauss has three chapbooks out: Nation-State (Blazevox); Address (Scantily Clad Press); Perhaps A Girl Elsewhere (Birds of Lace Press); in addition, he has poems which have been published in the Colorado Review, Fence, Interim, 1913: A Journal of Forms and the Parthenon West Review.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 84 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-077-4

$16

For Days by Adam Strauss Bo… by BlazeVOX [books]