The Sensory Cabinet by Mark DuCharme

Thrillingly centrifugal, “erupting into the air” [61], the energetic observations and exactly struck insights of The Sensory Cabinet make it a book to grab onto right now. Caster of the news into newness, our anchorman aloft, “Like Dan Rather on Helium” [15], Mark DuCharme is writing work that is exciting in every sense of the word. But if his poems make us nervous, the author’s unfailing nerve (his refusal to “stop feeling” [101]), offers a redemptive model, while his ecstatically brilliant humor is our reprieve. “Lose / the hairpiece,” the poet advises, “all is turning.” [31]

—Laura Mullen

Throughout this book and its poems, DuCharme seems to be about to define his project, but as you eagerly slide into a suggested narrowing, reader beware you are about to widen (yes you yourself) far before you hit the ground. The other poet who writes like that is Bernadette Mayer, in which the poem is tight but not suffocated. I don’t know if these poems may ‘work’ or ‘achieve’ more or less or equally than any other poems but I am certain that they risk more and in so doing enable a reading experience that is alive and challenging which is no small feat in these times in which mainstream poetry academicians have incorporated the language of the avant garde to liven and mask their neo-classical impulses. At every line I found myself being asked to think and to think quick and expansively. The poems in Mark DuCharme’s Sensory Cabinet feel their way into form cum content and content and song and sound cum form. I can continue to sing many praises for the poet Mark DuCharme, to his unique use of the serial, to his real world accountability, to his excellent vocabulary, to his lack of predictability no doubt even to himself, to his rhymes and humor, but since if you are reading this blurb you’ve picked his book up, do yourself a favor and read it yourself.

–Rachel Levitsky

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Mark DuCharme is the author of Infinity Subsections and Cosmopolitan Tremble. His poetry and essays on poetry have appeared widely in many journals. He has been in many places, but not enough, and is rumored to live somewhere between East and West Coasts.

· Paperback: 107 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] ( 2007 )
· ISBN: 1-934289-30-2
· LCCN: 2006940034

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