THE IMPERFECT George Tysh 92 pages, paperback Drawings by Janet Hamrick Design by Hazel Blake ISBN: 0-935992-33-2 Copyright © 2010 $14.00 George Tysh is the author of numerous books of poems, including Ovals and Echolalia. He was co-editor, with David Ball, of Blue Pig Magazine and has collaborated with conceptual artists Christian Boltanski and Sarkis. From 1980 to 1991, he directed LINES: New Writing at the Detroit Institute of Arts, and (with Chris Tysh) edited In Camera, a project devoted to works of the sexual imaginary. He currently teaches at the Roeper School in Birmingham, Michigan. The Imperfect is his first full-length collection of poems since 1992. "Somewhere between taking stock and stocking up these words impinge. Caught up once more in the eternal return of What can be said? What not? The scalar groove of all that? Restless, this troubling beauty of the still unfinished." Clark Coolidge "The nine-line poems, the four-line poems, the three-line poems - though all of them sparkle, it is not for his mastery of form that we value George Tysh's poetry. Rather we do so in response to his empathy, almost the simple pulse of a muscle, the "dictum to rectum" effect he writes of in a lovely poem. He knows as much about the way things look as he does about the needs that went into their making and abeyance. The poems of The Imperfect are written in Detroit, a "motor city" outside of which "methyl walls perspire" and "black men and white men / walk the streets" - yet they insinuate themselves into the brains of the feeling everywhere around the earth. I'm a sucker for this sort of thing. It's like Grace Jones used to say, George Tysh isn't perfect, but he's perfect for me." Kevin Killian UPDATED ORDERING INFO COMING SOON RETURN TO BOOK LIST |
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