8th Avenue Poems [Paperback]

Poetry. Stefan Brecht's 8TH AVENUE is a remarkable set of poems. Its spare style, determined by the moving eye in the urban streetscape and informed by a wry wit and bittersweet attachment to the common life and people of Manhattan, brings to mind the Objectivist vision of Charles Reznikoff. And like Reznikoff, Brecht gives us moments of wisdom, dark and unadorned, in an offhand, casual fashion. But this is also poetry that will suddenly veer into the abstractly philosophical and the socially analytic without missing a beat or losing the melody. Above all, it is uncompromising in its insistence that art face up to the way life is lived, along a pulsing artery of the greatest city in the world --Norman Finkelstein.