Otherwise Known as Home by Tim Wood

The poems shimmering in this volume represent an intense and vertiginous new beginning of the sonnet, erupting from the site of “end words.” Tim Wood’s re-embarkations are thrilling. I hesitate to impose metaphors on a work of art that stands on its own terms, but something related to time travel might turn attention in the right direction. Yet again, knowing that the poems originate with Shakespeare’s sonnets simply doesn’t prepare one for reading them, or at least only to the degree that wearing fustian might prepare one for mardi gras on Mars. These poems are wild and beautiful. They are something new in sonnetry!

—Lyn Hejinian

Love set these poems going—yes! like a fat gold watch!—and the impossible task of  keeping time, even as it rushes by at the speed of this particular poet’s epic underground commute from home and back again, is rendered palpable through invented procedures that map an ecstatic consciousness onto space and time.  At heart, this book is a kind of advent calendar continually counting down, but instead of anticipating a future moment, Wood marks perpetual presence, and each piece here— accumulating moment by moment, day by day, line by line, before our eyes—is a playful and tender revelation.  This is a grand-scale work about the history of literature; this is a collection of miniatures about the domestic tasks of fatherhood.  Like any good space/time travel, the excursion is a little disorienting.  I am elated to keep time with these dizzying and exhilarating poems.

—Robyn Schiff

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Tim Wood has published poems in various magazines and writes about American epic poetry, Herman Melville’s Clarel and Louis Zukofsky’s “A” in particular. He is coeditor of The Hip Hop Reader (Longman, 2008) and is an assistant professor of English at SUNY Nassau Community College in Garden City, New York.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 100 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-030-9

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