Collected Memoirs

Michael Gottlieb tells us of the years, and holds nothing back. The language poets, the New York poets, the whole shebang!

COLLECTED MEMOIRS is the third in Chax Press's uniform edition of Michael Gottlieb's works, joining the SELECTED POEMS (2021) and COLLECTED ESSAYS (2023). What are we doing then, when we delve into the past, our own or someone else's? Are we engaging in (auto)biography, archeology, history, a form of fiction, or nonfiction? Isn't examining the past a poetry of a sorts? Not merely nostalgia, but something else, something less easy to pin down. No doubt we delve into the past to make sense of our lives, perhaps even to justify them, but that's only part of the story. With these three memoirs, we read a life. Not at all a bad one, one well worth living, and well worth reading about.