Something for Everybody

The political arrives in pieces, settling across his sprawling poems like dew or debris. Berrigan has always matched his experimental drive with a personable quality. Boston Globe Anselm Berrigans eighth collection of poems, Something for Everybody, is exactly as its title describes. Wide-ranging in forms, densities, and aestheticsand written from numerous collaborations, prompts, and influencesthese poems express poetrys astonishing possibilities. At the same time, they evince this sin- gular poets consciousness in the here and now, as a family and community member looking at the seams of public life. For consciousness the world is dcor: sentences cast about For bodies in the exuberant wobble factory Q-Bert believes In me in the dark to pass out and check yourself out gliding By storefront windows searching for a feeling no ones felt In the last twelve seconds lathered with coeval nightmare Rhetoric of sociable extinction bashful as a wraith eking out A line of image extract to sprinkle on a plenty reeling mind. . . Anselm Berrigan is the editor of What is Poetry? (Just Kidding , I Know You Know): Interviews from the Poetry Project Newsletter (19832009), and is the author of many books of poetry, most recently Come In Alone and Primitive State. From 2003 to 2007 he was Artistic Director of The Poetry Project at St. Marks Church. He is Co-Chair, Writing at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts interdisciplinary MFA program and also teaches part-time at Brooklyn College.