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A mock-epic of the everyday
as it might be discovered through juxtapositions of
public and private information. Composed of poems, prose segments,
and visual
pieces, this remarkable first book is both formal and colloquial,
fluid and hard-edge,
with the diction riffing between Biblical and Dylanesque.
Lisa Jarnot was born in 1967. She has published several chapbooks
and currently
lives in New York City.
"Lisa Jarnot's Some Other Kind of Mission suggests that
Language Poetry may be
mutating, back to the modernism of Stein and Joyce, having been permanently
inflected (or deflected) by a late twetieth-century sharpness and
exasperation....
These are haunting, perplexing narratives of the inenarrable."
--John Ashbery, "International Books of the Year," Times
Literary Supplement
"...a progressive verse script driven by
compelling and compulsive projections.
Jarnot's poems incorporate and are incorporated in collages that build
graphic
meta-logics to dislocate the myth of history. Helen of Troy encounters
lucky Pierre;
20th century warplanes buzz through The Iliad.
This impressive newcomer's sudden jumps and quirky mappings may leave
some
heads spinning. Her visual poems, in particular are resonant and haunting,
requiring
and rewarding second and third looks."
--Tom Clark, San Francisco Chronicle
"Some Other Kind of Mission is not
a misnomer...It is a bit like entering Utah's
Canyonlands: the landscape is at first bleak, threatening, otherworldly.
But as
time is spent ... the richness of the land begins to inundate the
senses... Like
all difficult terrain, it invites its deal of active participation,
good binoculars and
a four-wheel drive."
--John Olson, Sulfur
"Her best effects arrive as you zoom headlong
right through her high-energy
tangle of dissociation ... in a particle accelerator where connective
sense is
bombarded by shards of broken grammar... dream-of-consciousness poems
that might be thought of as super-8 movies taken of thoughts just
moments
before articulation."
--Albert Mobilio, Village Voice
"a genre-bender of a book"
--Joseph Torra, Boston Book Review
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