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See What You Think
by David Rosenberg
Critical
Essays for the Next Avant-Garde
ISBN
1-881471-88-8 $12.00 US | $15.95
CAN 104 pages
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Above all, I
love the tone: unexpected, at times outrageous, seemingly
relaxed but
actually urgent, inspiring, lifting,
elevating—quintessentially Rosenberg.
Grace
Schulman
What do we mean when we speak of visionary
poetry? From the uncanny
vision of the group birth of John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait
In a Convex Mirror” at
Kenward Elmslie’s Vermont summer house, to the poet-filled
NYU classroom
of Harold Bloom, to the Vancouver archive of bp Nichol,
translator/poet of
Sumerian cuneiform, back to Eden itself as it is revealed
in the Kabbalah,
David Rosenberg’s trajectory has led him through all the
“sublime disguises” that
the visionary must assume in order to speak his gnosis.
These essays are
addressed to “the next avant garde”—not fashionable
bohemians or recherché
theorists, but dedicated trackers on the evolutionary
path. Beyond the illusion
of schools and styles, Rosenberg knows that poets are the
ecologists of Paradise.
Norman Finkelstein
David Rosenberg has pulled off a quirky, original
and
persistently stimulating and
entertaining book. He has kept the faith
with the
avant-garde, while transcending
its limitations and hermeticisms. A
delicious
achievement. Phillip
Lopate
David Rosenberg’s essays inhabit that borderland where
art and science, spirit and
body, the literal and the metaphorical, the human and the
non-human, the oral and
the transcribed all blur together. Rosenberg is uninhibited
in the best sense of the
word, and his essays are inspiring reminders of just how
strange it is to be human,
trailing an evolutionary past and dreaming of a limitless
future. Jonathan
Rosen
Nothing else is like these pieces. There is a certain
dream character to them,
as when we recognize everyone in the room, except that they
are different. As
in a transforming mythography, they are the same and
not-same. Michael Palmer
On David
Rosenberg's books
Dreams of Being Eaten Alive
“Rosenberg's strength is his ability to convey both the
high dramatic force of the piece and
the uncanny defamiliarizing of the biblical text on which
it is based, while at the same time
retaining an earthy humor.”
Jonathan Wilson, New York Times Book Review
The Book of J
“An illuminating attempt to liberate the origins of the
Bible…a classic of translation.” Greil
Marcus
“Surpassing originality.” New
York Times
The Lost Book of Paradise
“A love story between two poet-scholars: a contemporary
one, David Rosenberg, and an
ancient one, a woman who sprang from his desire and
imagination.” Andrei
Codrescu, NPR, All Things Considered
A Poet's Bible
“Rosenberg's translations from the Hebrew Bible are the best in the
twentieth
century without a doubt.” Hayden
Carruth, The Nation
David
Rosenberg
Of
David
Rosenberg's books in the past
decade, two have been
New York Times Notable Books of the Year, while a
third,
A Poet's Bible, was given the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club
Prize, the first major literary award for a biblical translation.
Rosenberg's
The Book of J, with commentary by Harold Bloom, was
a national bestseller. More recently, his 1973 volume, The
Necessity
of Poetry, was restored online (chbooks.com) and his book
on the Kabbalah, Dreams of Being Eaten Alive, has been
released
in paperback. Residing in Berkeley with his wife, the writer
Rhonda
Rosenberg, he is completing the second biography
of
Abraham.
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