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| Ron Palmer has created the voice of a queer fallen angel, questioning, seeking furious, terrified. His angel weeps and cracks jokes about sinning pleasure, and sings with pure intensity about longing for grace. The poems riff in jumpy rhythms, fractured dream-language, curses, and surprise us with exquiste beauty. A provocative debut. —Miriam Levine, author of In Paterson |
| Against the backdrop of glib and sardonic attempts at experiment so prevalent today, Ronald Palmer's poems gleam and glimmer. What does it mean to fracture the narrative? To siphon the story through one's own body? To schism the very language we use? And how do we do this without compromising the lyric? In Logicalogics, Palmer shows us how, and he does so with a breathtaking respect for the lyric and what it can and cannot hold. —C. Dale Young |
| Ron Palmer's Logicalogics, like all of his work, brings together four heterogeneous elements in uneasy, sometimes vertiginous, juxtaposition. First, and always, Palmer has an unfailing ear for the cadences and rhythms of the English lyric; his lyric voice reverberates through, in spite of-or perhaps because of-the typographical violence done to the visual word and line on the page. Second, his imagery and rhetoric are never less than grandiloquent; this is grunge raised to operatic heights; the sleaziest detail is invested with the grandeur of classical tragedy. Third, he has managed, mirabile dictu, to return homosexuality to scandal and its essential unrespectability (and brava, sister, I say); Palmer's is an utterly undomesticated sexual sensibility. He may be one of the few living gay poets who actually fucks. Fourth, there is throughout evidence (which never advertises itself as such) of profound and rigorous philosophical reflection. Taken together, Palmer's lyricism, his operatic grandiloquence, his unrepentant celebrations of disreputable sex, and his profound thoughtfulness, perhaps add up to something: like every poet, Palmer reinvents, yet once again but always for the first time, the utter improbability of the fact of language in its very possibility. —William Haver, Department of Comparative Literature, Binghamton University | |
Logicalogics
Ronald Palmer
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| Paper | 6 1/2 x 8 | 100 pgs. | ISBN: 1-932360-88-3 | List: $13.95 | 10/1/2005 |
Available on Powells.com, Amazon.com, from your local BookSense store, and bookstores everywhere!
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About the book: In Logicalogics Palmer turns gender and queer theory inside out and offers his life and mind as a scientific anomaly, offering snippets of his jolting responses to 21st century consciousness. He comes out as a young queer person within the AIDS pandemic, and documents that historical moment and precisely how it happened inside his own body, while capturing the aftermath of a clinically dysfunctional as well as emotionally and psychologically incestuous family. In styles that range from punctuation experimentation combining techniques of ee cummings and A. R. Ammons to a blurring of dream language into political statement using the lyric tradition, to the modes of narrative poetry, confessional poetry and surrealism, Palmer seeks to narrow the gap that both Frank O'Hara and Gertrude Stein posited about the infancy of writing and the middle age of painting.
About the author: Ronald Palmer was born in 1966 in New Canaan, Connecticut. He graduated from Bethel High School in Bethel, Connecticut. He has two older sisters. His undergraduate education brought him to University of New Hampshire, University of California at Santa Cruz and Cambridge University in Cambridge, England. He received graduate degrees in English from New York University (M.A.) in 1993 and from Binghamton University where he completed a Ph.D. in 1996. He was a writer in residence in Theory at The Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, Netherlands from 1999-2000. His writing has been included in various online journals including Slope, La Petite Zine, Shampoo, Unpleasant Event Schedule and Xconnect, as well as in print journals such as 3rd Bed, Barrow Street, Green Mountains Review, Fence, Parallax and Topic Magazine. His poem "The Logic of Queerness" is included in the anthology Bend, Don't Shatter: Poets on the Beginning of Desire, edited by T. Cole Rachel and Rita D. Costello. Presently, in 2004, he rides his Kona mountain bike around Golden Gate Park and Ocean Beach. He lives with his boyfriend Kevin Rolston in San Francisco.
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From the book:
CONTENTS: 2
Colon: Ostomy: 5
75: Co: lons: for A: R: Am: mons 6
Urinal 8
The Logic of Grieving 9
Icarus Nimbus 11
The Crown of Blue Strawberries 12
The Logic of Desire 13
Jetty 16
Learning the Language of Your Jaw 17
Hom: (Age To Hip) Hop: 18
Father In A Translucent Closet 20
Scanning The Toxic Room 21
The Logic of Addiction 23
Avocados 26
Subject: Matter(s): Identity: 27
History Of Violence 28
The Logic of Soul 29
The Dildo 30
Grace Valve 31
Subject: Matter(s): Wombs: 32
Con: (At): Trite 33
Virus: Consciousness: 35
Verb Confusion: (No Suggestions) 36
The Logic of Longing 38
The Dream of The Cow 39
Diapason 40
The Logic of Secrecy 41
The Ice Lake 42
The Logic of Master 43
The Limit of One Whore's Speakability 44
Camou: Flag: E(l): Lation 46
The Logic of Celibacy (Sorrow Kills Remix) 47
The Logic of Mourning 49 |
