Uncertain Remains by Michael Boughn

In Michael Boughn’s Uncertain Remains, fragmented remainders escape from other books, mutated and recontextualized in the presence of new outbursts, to engage a world of often brutal fact while looking for an uncertain hold in “the sphinx of tomorrow”’s promise. Boughn summons whatever thinking/language he can find and put to work—philosophy, advertising, politics, music, math—to address and unpack the mysteries that surround us. Observed from beyond the end of modernity, these uncertain remains “incised and meted out / in unearthly portions with nothing beyond” speak both the agony and joy of a “new world” founded in violence and slaughter, but searching for a path of redemption in the ruins of an ordinary world.

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“Uncertain Remains is a great title for this book, not just provocative but critical to the poetics of sorting Michael Boughn practices, casting his “syntactic net” while shilling the “post truth reality” of “America’s dark magic.” Big job! The map is very interlinear with the poems “dangling” synaesthetic threads of noos that turn and translate into themselves; the algorithms are melodic rather than harmonic. Big music!”

—Fred Wah

“An insistence rings through these poems that pushes an adjacency through to the real, and back again. Slipping in this manner, the language of Uncertain Remains plays wild and loose with the usual and supposes a fresh intelligence for its operations. Michael Boughn’s Uncertain Remains is a deeply informed–by aesthetics, by politics–poetic supposition, allied to a gathering instinct to go for the throat.”

—Sharon Thesen

“Michael Boughn is a cross between John Donne and Attila the Hun.”

—Billie Chernicoff

“If you are looking for certainty, you’ve come to the wrong book! These are poems that set out to reclaim the soul in the age of rampant materialism. Boughn argues “the poem’s mystery throbs / with light burns to beat the band / holy luminous meat in the dark / dance at the end of an iamb’s / errant yardarm in the night / of our soul’s spin / through hell’s terrain vague.” In other words, “Don’t confuse Milvian Bridge with Cinvat Bridge,” which leads the soul into Paradise. Uncertain Remains is a grand quest to redeem our decadent culture.”

—Robert Hogg

Michael Boughn spent much of his adult life in a complicated relationship with borders which has led to a lack of determinable national identity and a general sense of disordered devotion to a common mind. He has published numerous books of poetry in both Canada and the US, including Hermetic Divagations–After HD and City–A Poem from the End of the World. Cosmographia—A Post-Lucretian Faux Micro-Epic (Book Thug, 2011) was short-listed for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, leading one Canadian commentator in the Globe and Mail to describe him as “an obscure, veteran poet with a history of being overlooked by the mainstream.” A collection of essays on poetry, Measure’s Measures — Literary Assays, is forthcoming from Station Hill Press (Barrytown, NY) in 2022. He is the co-editor with Victor Coleman of Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book. From 2014 to 2018 he edited the online turmoil called Dispatches from the Poetry Wars with co-conspirator, Kent Johnson, which is now archived in the Contemporary Literature Collection at Simon Fraser University Library’s Special Collections.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 98 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-406-2

$18

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