Cement Guitar [Paperback]

In this striking debut collection, Michael Carlson offers poems that combine the concrete and the musical, while embodying a tendency toward contradiction. He writes by working with rhythms, structures, images, associational leaps, and an obsession with the sound of words, as opposed to narrative. The book begins, A thing wants to pounce but can't, and this spirit of hesitation continues throughout the volume. 

The first section of the book contains heavily rhythmic poems measured sometimes by syllable, sometimes by stress, dealing with rural landscapes, a struggle with disillusionment, and a reconciliation of knowledge and belief. The second section confronts the terrain and people of Carlson's childhood in Rhode Island, using longer sentences, riskier enjambments, and a more colloquial and emotional language. 

The poems in the third sectionwhich range from Manhattan to Florida, Vietnam, and Parisshare a tendency to be more fantastic and are formal in weird ways. They include an homage to Ezra Pound borrowing the vocabulary of his first book and the syntax of his last, a nod to John Donne borrowing some of his stanza shapes, a sonnet whose constraint is that each of its fourteen lines contains a piece of armor, and a sestina composed of four syllable lines with four end words that rhyme. In the fourth section, Carlson returns to Brooklyn, speaks from the present, and resolves his stances in a brief notational way that is reminiscent of Chinese poetry.

MICHAEL CARLSON,who lives in Brooklyn, is a New York City Teaching Fellow.

One
A Dozen Thunders Outside Oxford, IA 
Caesarea Philippi 
Galley-West 
Bloomington to Columbia 
Post October 
Gargoyle 
Christy Mathewson Memorial Stadium 
Follow with Me My Plow 

Two
New Music for Pornography 
Ryan Blazejewski 
Merry America 
Drum 
Death by Frisbee in the GarlÃF