A Carnage in the Lovetrees: Poems (Hardcover )

A Carnage in the Lovetrees: Poems Book Description

"Building slowly from pieces scattered, even shattered, but still unnervingly present, Greenfield's story speaks for many, yet he presents it uniquely, revealing language as a mode of perception that can rearrange the past--but only if it's quick enough. Greenfield's language is that quick--and sharp, and startlingly beautiful."--Cole Swensen, author of "Such Rich Hour

"Like a blue-faced television in a darkened room, a backstory lights up this rhapsodic outpouring. This is a cunning attack on both the ever-fading memory and on conventional methods of poetic confession --'The trigger is set on annihilation.' I'm truly amazed by these poems."--Mary Jo Bang, author of "Louise in Love

"Greenfield tells us to 'Recognize the world, ' know it again, since the only knowledge that counts is re-cognition. He presents those second knowings, recapitulations, bright flashing revisitings of pain and pleasure, which enact a kind of fumbling seduction between us and the world. In this book we recognize our best possibilities, and our worst fears, but it is all brilliant. This book is brilliance."--Bin Ramke, author of "Airs, Waters, Places
"Surely, all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end," said Rilke. "A Carnage in the Lovetrees" begins at the moment the speaker reaches this realization. He resolves then to rebuild a world caught in the crosshairs of repeated annihilation, regrounding love as the only viable stratagem for survival. Richard Greenfield's sequence of poems searches for a way to live in the aftermath of private trauma and public disaster. It represents a struggle to reconcile the historical with the present and to find a language that allows the speaker to endure past calamities. These relentless, acrobatic, and self-aware poems resist settling for easy solutions, or even closure, but instead push toward the difficult compromise of the livable.

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