New Jersey

by Betsy Andrews

University of Wisconsin Press, 2007
eISBN: 978-0-299-22143-0 | Cloth: 978-0-299-22140-9 | Paper: 978-0-299-22144-7
Library of Congress Classification PS3601.N5526N49 2007
Dewey Decimal Classification 811.6

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Betsy Andrews’s sweeping, energetic, book-length poem pounds the pavement of the New Jersey Turnpike, driving through America—past landfills and wetlands and weapons labs—under the towering shadows of engines, oil, and war. With a disarmingly unique voice that evokes the tradition of Pound and Eliot, Whitman and Williams and Ginsberg, Andrews creates a pastiche of landscape, consciousness, history, and politics in this American age.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Betsy Andrews is author of She-Devil and In Trouble. Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared widely, in publications ranging from PRACTICE to the Yemeni newspaper Culture.

REVIEWS

"New Jersey hotwired, New Jersey on speed: the Turnpike unrolls its scathing demotic across the humiliated landscape that was once a bright idea; the Turnpike dreams of minutemen and wakes to Abu Ghraib; the Turnpike names its toll plazas for poets and founding fathers and channels its weary to Burger Kings and ATMs. No help for us, the country's in the breakdown lane. But Betsy Andrews writes its antic obit in a vein so charged with wit and razzle-dazzle that something must be salvageable even now. We must, in spite of ourselves, have done something right. New Jersey is a brilliant debut."—Linda Gregerso

“Serving the swerve from witness to outrage, the poem follows war's disastrous trajectory from domestic to international policy and singular to universal tragedy with unrelenting honesty. Andrews has a queer eye for empire, and this work is an incisive, exciting, and necessary intervention."—Brian Teare, author of The Room Where I Was Born

"The heart of darkness is alive and beating in Betsy Andrews's New Jersey. This well-investigated sweep of a poem builds and passionately sustains itself through many luminous hallucinatory details. With its commitment to naming, to witnessing the machinations and degradations of our 'terror,' this is a brave poem, and a necessary one."—Anne Waldman, The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics

TABLE OF CONTENTS

you're okay, you're okay

--excerpt from New Jersey

EXCERPT
“a bus full of party delegates slouching in their friction-charged skins rolls past the jobbing line, rolls past the meat-packing plant toward the birth of a new convulsive nature, a countrywide husbandry, an emotional swing, the dream of the dream of the dream of a driver, seated and commandeering down the gaping streets of retractable housing where the aluminum siding licks its own wounds, and a four-year-old in the driveway repeats to herself, you’re okay, you’re okay” —excerpt from New Jersey © The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. All rights reserved.

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