University of Iowa Press, 2014 Paper: 978-1-60938-241-4 | eISBN: 978-1-60938-253-7 Library of Congress Classification PS3612.I5547A6 2014 Dewey Decimal Classification 811.6
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
How far are we from the Lake District? How far from the garden? Eric Linsker’s first book scrolls down the Anthropocene, tracking our passage through a technophilic pastoral where work and play are both forms of making others suffer in order to exist. In La Far, the world is faraway near, a hell conveniently elsewhere in which workers bundle Foxconn’s “rare earths” into the “frosty kits” that return us our content, but also the sea meeting land as it always has. Both are singable conditions and lead, irreversibly, to odes equally comfortable with praise and lament. The poems in La Far hope that by making the abstract concrete and the concrete abstract, “literalizing / a nightingale beyond / knowledge,” we might construct what Wordsworth called a “Common Day,” a communized life partaken of by all.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Eric Linsker holds degrees from Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, Chicago Review, Conjunctions, and Lana Turner. He lives in Brooklyn, where he coedits The Claudius App with Jeff Nagy and teaches at CUNY.
REVIEWS
"Linsker's poems examine the world's movement, language and identity in the internet era with a craft that is original and unnerving."
— Publishers Weekly
"La Far stands as a lasting poetic landmark."
— Connor Fisher, 32poems.com
"One of the most vise-like poems I have ever encountered is 'We're So Social Now.'... You need to read the whole poem to understand how its grip works... In six pages of glitch, you will construct a kind of social coherence; you'll 'gang narrate,' as Linsker might say. While the poem shows sense-making at its most basic, it also (and I think this is the real achievement), enacts the web's peculiar sociality of nearing farness and far nearness. The poem has something of the cover photograph's uncanniness, its sense of wireless intimacy mingled with the impersonal solipsism of the screen-grab. To look is to flatten one world against another. And against her gesture—keep your distance—I keep looking."
— Callie Garnett, Public Books
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
Satisfaction of the Instincts
Idioteque
Stationing
App
Ode (Distracted)
Multitude
The Environment
Operative Spring
Under Aegis
Common Day
Pyramid Song
Historical Ecstasy
Both Sides
Work
Facts After Baudelaire
Arena
Fluid Achievement
Play
Temporary Activities
Reasoning of Sea
Figure
Available
A Place Where Everything Is Visible
Dongzhou Sea
Tower
Amaryllis
In the Raid Instances
The Unities
Love Streams
Irreversibility Ode
We're So Social Now
State
Sea of Land
Orometry
Neutralization
Land of Reasoning
Act Without Words
Possible Experience
Rare Earths
Hope Mountain
Harpes et Luz
Acknowledgments
Iowa Poetry Prize and Edwin Ford Piper Poetry Award Winners
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 Iowa Press, 2014 Paper: 978-1-60938-241-4 eISBN: 978-1-60938-253-7
How far are we from the Lake District? How far from the garden? Eric Linsker’s first book scrolls down the Anthropocene, tracking our passage through a technophilic pastoral where work and play are both forms of making others suffer in order to exist. In La Far, the world is faraway near, a hell conveniently elsewhere in which workers bundle Foxconn’s “rare earths” into the “frosty kits” that return us our content, but also the sea meeting land as it always has. Both are singable conditions and lead, irreversibly, to odes equally comfortable with praise and lament. The poems in La Far hope that by making the abstract concrete and the concrete abstract, “literalizing / a nightingale beyond / knowledge,” we might construct what Wordsworth called a “Common Day,” a communized life partaken of by all.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Eric Linsker holds degrees from Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, Chicago Review, Conjunctions, and Lana Turner. He lives in Brooklyn, where he coedits The Claudius App with Jeff Nagy and teaches at CUNY.
REVIEWS
"Linsker's poems examine the world's movement, language and identity in the internet era with a craft that is original and unnerving."
— Publishers Weekly
"La Far stands as a lasting poetic landmark."
— Connor Fisher, 32poems.com
"One of the most vise-like poems I have ever encountered is 'We're So Social Now.'... You need to read the whole poem to understand how its grip works... In six pages of glitch, you will construct a kind of social coherence; you'll 'gang narrate,' as Linsker might say. While the poem shows sense-making at its most basic, it also (and I think this is the real achievement), enacts the web's peculiar sociality of nearing farness and far nearness. The poem has something of the cover photograph's uncanniness, its sense of wireless intimacy mingled with the impersonal solipsism of the screen-grab. To look is to flatten one world against another. And against her gesture—keep your distance—I keep looking."
— Callie Garnett, Public Books
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
Satisfaction of the Instincts
Idioteque
Stationing
App
Ode (Distracted)
Multitude
The Environment
Operative Spring
Under Aegis
Common Day
Pyramid Song
Historical Ecstasy
Both Sides
Work
Facts After Baudelaire
Arena
Fluid Achievement
Play
Temporary Activities
Reasoning of Sea
Figure
Available
A Place Where Everything Is Visible
Dongzhou Sea
Tower
Amaryllis
In the Raid Instances
The Unities
Love Streams
Irreversibility Ode
We're So Social Now
State
Sea of Land
Orometry
Neutralization
Land of Reasoning
Act Without Words
Possible Experience
Rare Earths
Hope Mountain
Harpes et Luz
Acknowledgments
Iowa Poetry Prize and Edwin Ford Piper Poetry Award Winners
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