Waking From Myself [Paperback]

“Words say too much to let you know the truth.’’ George Quasha’s torqued, enigmatic proverbs create unlikely balances among discrepant engagements.Waking from Myselfis the sixth volume published of George Quasha’s “preverbs,” an invented poetic genre that’s the flipside of “proverbs”—instead of giving capsules of wisdom, they awaken language to its inevitable ambiguities in the face of complex truth-telling. The vectors of these marvelous poems work at cross purposes, keeping each other aloft. If William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell” are poetry, then George Quasha’s preverbs are like a close cousin. Its core question is: can poetry say the unsayable?

"Preverbs do what Frank O’Hara said about Abstract Expressionist paintings: they leave 'the event of [their] passage.' In a continuum of lines, or line clusters, they move down the page like bright fractals…. These are poems that turn their own originality inside out. They write on the veil they lift and dance a step or two beyond our reach" —William Benton, author ofBacklit, BirdsandMadly: A Novel

 

"'Words say too much to let you know the truth.’' George Quasha’s torqued, enigmatic preverbs create unlikely balances among discrepant engagements. The vectors of these marvelous poems work at cross purposes, keeping each other aloft. These are sparkling aphoristic aporias for a new age in an old time. 'Poetry,' says Quasha, 'resists immortality with difficulty.' And also with wit and charm. Be here now, in which case immortality will take care of itself" —Charles Bernstein, author ofRecalculatingandAttack of the Difficult Poems

 

"Like a festive tempest of flitting iterates, Quasha’sPreverbsprovide a lexical elixir— an infinilC<