Porous Borders

In his latest collection, David Giannini works the "porous borders" between poetry and prose, tragedy and whimsy, gravity and absurdity, to offer up a grab bag of playful, thought-provoking pleasures that are "something more than real" but rather "meta-real, hyper-real, surreal, irreal," as befits a world in which "the real thing . . . is always at least partly a drafty, shifty, get-my-drift, daffy alembic grab-bag, wifty and makeshift." Not so these verbal gems, whose fancy and fantasy enriches their resonance in an alchemy akin to "light tr[ying] to shed from a dark place to golden itself" or those answers "behind every door . . . eavesdrop[ping] on the deft noise of questions" which we hadn't realized were troubling us, until encountering this unique and delightful book.
Susan Lewis, editor of Posit, author of Heisenberg's Salon

In these vertical prose poems, Porous (more Stevens's Crispin than Berryman's Henry) takes us through condensed narratives to grand myth and philosophy. Correspondence here leads to contradiction: "each is a shutter of the other." And along the way devilish angels offer "another place, also of poetry, a place of lyric dissociation, a locus" on the page-these "micro-monoliths" swirl with macro-spin.
Dennis Barone