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| [O]ne of the finest younger poets now writing —Paul Hoover, editor of the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry |
The first thing you notice about David Breskin is that he's got chops up the wazoo and is fabulously intelligent. It may take longer to start seeing through his fierce and faceted eye or to notice how many of our lived-in worlds it sees in all their dazzle of simultaneity and fact. This is poetry in which the intimate and public worlds do not exclude each other but mutually refract their signs and lights, and where even the self on which the world imposes its unrelenting politics can earn, with ingenuity and effort, its meed of radiance.
—Rafi Zabor on Escape Velocity |
| A beautiful book, accomplished in style, and surprising in the range of its concerns, Fresh Kills is most of all exemplary in the way Breskin manages to infuse literal details and situations with extra-literal significance, the way, that is, he manages to describe the world beyond the self in a language that does so much more than just describe. These are challenging, surprising and very moving poems. —Alan Shapiro on Fresh Kills | |
| Cloth | 8 1/2" x 8 1/2" | 192 pgs. | ISBN: 1-933368-41-1 | List: $24.95 | 01/1/2007 |
Available on Powells.com, Amazon.com, from your local BookSense store, and bookstores everywhere!
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Featuring:
About the book: Loosely inspired by the story of tsunami survivor Petra Nemcova, the heroine of Supermodel is an outsized force of nature: fiercely competitive, intellectually curious, emotionally wounded, resolutely moral, and of course, ravishingly attractive- a globe-trotting innocent who exudes sexuality in every way...except the most obvious.
As she literally clings to life, her story is revealed in a series of flashbacks which wing us from Middle East to Wild West, desert to tropics, country to city- all vividly described, in potent couplets, as paradises found and lost. Breskin peppers this dark comedy with unsettling wordplay, shrewd social commentary, and a reporter's acute eye for the facts of life: his virtuosic writing matches the breathless pace and rich complexity of his heroine's travails. But even as Breskin relates this supermodel's tale, his master narrative is matched (and mocked) by strangely salient scrolls of "found poetry"? culled from internet sites.
This high-pitched whine of our information superhighway- complete with detours, roadblocks, and accidents that turn out not so accidental- slices across, diverges from, abuts, bridges over, and tunnels under his story in a radically new feat of literary dovetailing. By melding a classic suspense yarn with a subtle meditation on our need for, and love for, models of all types, David Breskin has created a lush portrait on a buzzing canvas- charged offering for our age of tabloid TV and the tangled "always on" world wide web.
About the author: David Breskin was born in Chicago in 1958. From the late '70s through the early '90s he was a freelance journalist, writing investigative and culturally-oriented pieces for a number of national magazines, most prominently GQ and Rolling Stone. He is the author of a novel, The Real Life Diary of a Boomtown Girl (1989) and of Inner Views: Filmmakers in Conversation (1997), which collected dialogues with directors David Lynch, Francis Coppola, Robert Altman, Clint Eastwood, Spike Lee, Oliver Stone, Tim Burton, and David Cronenberg. Over the last twenty years, he has also produced records for an assortment of leading-edge musicians, most recently Bill Frisell's RICHTER 858 and Bobby Previte's The 23 Constellations of Joan Miro.
His first volume of poetry, Fresh Kills, was published in 1997, and his second, Escape Velocity, was published by Soft Skull Press in 2004. His poems have appeared in many periodicals, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TriQuarterly, New American Writing, Parnassus, and Boulevard.
He has also worked with prominent visual artists on a wide range of projects. In 2002, he conceived, produced and edited RICHTER 858, a book exploring abstract paintings of Gerhard Richter through image, music, text, and poetry. His next book project, Dirty Baby, is a collaboration with Ed Ruscha.
He lives in San Francisco with his wife Isabel Breskin, an art historian, and their two children, Billie Miro and Thelonious Blue.
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