University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022 Paper: 978-0-8229-6695-1 | eISBN: 978-0-8229-8960-8
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
In Endurable Infinity, Tony Kitt creates his own tangential surrealism through wonder, intuition, and surprising connections. If the original surrealists of the 1930s sought to unleash the unconscious mind by bringing elements of dreams to the waking world with jarring juxtapositions, Kitt’s poetry is more about transmutation, or leaps, from word to word and phrase to phrase. He takes American poet Charles Borkhuis’s statement that contemporary surrealist poets write “from inside language” as a challenge and a call to action.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Tony Kitt lives in Dublin, Ireland. His poetry chapbook The Magic Phlute was published by SurVision Books in 2019. He edited the anthology Invasion: Ukrainian Poems about the War (SurVision Books, 2022).
His poems have been translated into Italian and Romanian and appear in Oxford Poetry, the North, Plume, Poetry Ireland Review, the Prague Revue, Cyphers, Under the Radar, the American Journal of Poetry, Stride, and other journals and anthologies.
REVIEWS
“Tony Kitt’s Endurable Infinity is a pyrotechnic display of delirious volcanic eruptions that illuminate the surreal underbelly of words. His dazzling bursts of imagery take us from the outside looking in to the inside looking out in the way ‘A magician pulls you from a hat.’ Kitt’s sharp, satirical juxtapositions grow eyes on trees, signaling to us like ‘dollar-sign smoke rings from Magritte’s pipe.’ The brilliant barbs of insight buried in these quick lines pay impressive dividends upon a close reading.” —Charles Borkhuis, author of Dead Ringer
“Tony Kitt at once renews and preserves the spirit of surrealist poetry. His sense of wonder is cast in the colors of film noir. This poet does not fear to introduce sly ironies into the very cusp of verbal revelation, starting with the book’s title Endurable Infinity. As bravely as Lautréamont and Artaud, Kitt discovers the monstrous inside the marvelous, ‘an abyss inside the abyss.’ Here is language that lies awake on the nightside of existence.” —Andrew Joron, author of The Absolute Letter
“‘Has anybody flown / to holiness from a language?’ asks Tony Kitt in his remarkable new book, Endurable Infinity. An heir to the Bretonian impulse of ‘the marvelous,’ Kitt electrifies impulses both human and galactic. Sometimes socially conscious, his stunning poems avoid expected diatribes, unfolding into complexities of what could be: ‘Don’t bigfish me. / Open your Michelangelo mouth.’ He offers an uneasy wisdom (‘Loving is living your life backwards’) that simultaneously dismantles language: ‘You forgave me / for what you were going to do to me.’ Kitt asks us to undo ourselves (‘Is there a hunter fond of unhunting?’) in the reconstitution of the possible.” —George Kalamaras, poet laureate emeritus of Indiana, and author of Through the Silk-Heavy Rains
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
I. Close Formation
Hostilities
Motherland-In-Law
Close Formation
You Know Something Isn’t Right
Looking Upwards
Don’t Tsar It
In Mid-Air
Ninety Years a Grove
Out of the Fog
Famine
Indigene
Huachuma, the Flesh of the Gods
Limboed
Sea Oranges
Eva / Ewig
Hail, Victoria!
A Collage Has a Thousand Mouths
Down the Grete Stern’s Well
Yves Tanguy
Hannah and Other Palindromes
Stone
II. Genius loci temporisque
Incendiary Innocence
The Isle in the Haze
Finlandia
Slab Replacement, Lubyanka
Calabria (1)
Calabria (2)
Calabria (3)
Ionica
Aeolia
Full-Stop Land
Ithaca
Tibet
Caucasus
Naregno, Elba
Montparnasse
Recanati
Tristram of Cornwall
El corazón
The Art of Unskying People
The Black River
III. Slanting Through
Polonaise
Decembering Through
Debt
Junk
Pheme
An Identikit
Plant Silence
Slanting Through
Equus
Lockdown
Music for the Virus
Something You Should Know
Mene, Tekel, Fares
Tutelage
Evergreen
One-Way Life
Oculus oculorum
Afterglow
Ship of Fools
The Pilgrim’s Progress from Bedford Gaol to the Strait Gates
1. Ninety-Ninth Exhalation of Exile
2. A Tide Gauge
3. Pelléas et Mélisande
4. Transfigured Night
The Cornerstone of Tomorrow
Acknowledgments
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022 Paper: 978-0-8229-6695-1 eISBN: 978-0-8229-8960-8
In Endurable Infinity, Tony Kitt creates his own tangential surrealism through wonder, intuition, and surprising connections. If the original surrealists of the 1930s sought to unleash the unconscious mind by bringing elements of dreams to the waking world with jarring juxtapositions, Kitt’s poetry is more about transmutation, or leaps, from word to word and phrase to phrase. He takes American poet Charles Borkhuis’s statement that contemporary surrealist poets write “from inside language” as a challenge and a call to action.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Tony Kitt lives in Dublin, Ireland. His poetry chapbook The Magic Phlute was published by SurVision Books in 2019. He edited the anthology Invasion: Ukrainian Poems about the War (SurVision Books, 2022).
His poems have been translated into Italian and Romanian and appear in Oxford Poetry, the North, Plume, Poetry Ireland Review, the Prague Revue, Cyphers, Under the Radar, the American Journal of Poetry, Stride, and other journals and anthologies.
REVIEWS
“Tony Kitt’s Endurable Infinity is a pyrotechnic display of delirious volcanic eruptions that illuminate the surreal underbelly of words. His dazzling bursts of imagery take us from the outside looking in to the inside looking out in the way ‘A magician pulls you from a hat.’ Kitt’s sharp, satirical juxtapositions grow eyes on trees, signaling to us like ‘dollar-sign smoke rings from Magritte’s pipe.’ The brilliant barbs of insight buried in these quick lines pay impressive dividends upon a close reading.” —Charles Borkhuis, author of Dead Ringer
“Tony Kitt at once renews and preserves the spirit of surrealist poetry. His sense of wonder is cast in the colors of film noir. This poet does not fear to introduce sly ironies into the very cusp of verbal revelation, starting with the book’s title Endurable Infinity. As bravely as Lautréamont and Artaud, Kitt discovers the monstrous inside the marvelous, ‘an abyss inside the abyss.’ Here is language that lies awake on the nightside of existence.” —Andrew Joron, author of The Absolute Letter
“‘Has anybody flown / to holiness from a language?’ asks Tony Kitt in his remarkable new book, Endurable Infinity. An heir to the Bretonian impulse of ‘the marvelous,’ Kitt electrifies impulses both human and galactic. Sometimes socially conscious, his stunning poems avoid expected diatribes, unfolding into complexities of what could be: ‘Don’t bigfish me. / Open your Michelangelo mouth.’ He offers an uneasy wisdom (‘Loving is living your life backwards’) that simultaneously dismantles language: ‘You forgave me / for what you were going to do to me.’ Kitt asks us to undo ourselves (‘Is there a hunter fond of unhunting?’) in the reconstitution of the possible.” —George Kalamaras, poet laureate emeritus of Indiana, and author of Through the Silk-Heavy Rains
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
I. Close Formation
Hostilities
Motherland-In-Law
Close Formation
You Know Something Isn’t Right
Looking Upwards
Don’t Tsar It
In Mid-Air
Ninety Years a Grove
Out of the Fog
Famine
Indigene
Huachuma, the Flesh of the Gods
Limboed
Sea Oranges
Eva / Ewig
Hail, Victoria!
A Collage Has a Thousand Mouths
Down the Grete Stern’s Well
Yves Tanguy
Hannah and Other Palindromes
Stone
II. Genius loci temporisque
Incendiary Innocence
The Isle in the Haze
Finlandia
Slab Replacement, Lubyanka
Calabria (1)
Calabria (2)
Calabria (3)
Ionica
Aeolia
Full-Stop Land
Ithaca
Tibet
Caucasus
Naregno, Elba
Montparnasse
Recanati
Tristram of Cornwall
El corazón
The Art of Unskying People
The Black River
III. Slanting Through
Polonaise
Decembering Through
Debt
Junk
Pheme
An Identikit
Plant Silence
Slanting Through
Equus
Lockdown
Music for the Virus
Something You Should Know
Mene, Tekel, Fares
Tutelage
Evergreen
One-Way Life
Oculus oculorum
Afterglow
Ship of Fools
The Pilgrim’s Progress from Bedford Gaol to the Strait Gates
1. Ninety-Ninth Exhalation of Exile
2. A Tide Gauge
3. Pelléas et Mélisande
4. Transfigured Night
The Cornerstone of Tomorrow
Acknowledgments
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled.
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE