Severance Songs

by Joshua Corey

Poetry. Winner of the Dorset Prize, selected by Ilya Kaminsky. In his third full-length book of poems, Joshua Corey puts the sonnet to the test with this sequence of fractured, ventilated, and unrhymed poems written in the aftermath of 9/11 while Corey was living at a pastoral remove from war and terror in upstate New York. The tension between idyllic personal circumstances and horrific world-historical events led Corey to produce this series of layered poems, variously sardonic and sincere in tone. "These songs shuttle between a past and a future, cast adrift or severed from a violent, ashen present into a necessary untimeliness .... What then of the sonnet, repository of desire and enemy of time? It is, as ever, that form by which we re-imagine subjectivity to confront altered circumstances, and to assess 'the shipwreck of the singular' in the maelstrom of the many..."—Michael Palmer.

Genres: Poetry

69 pages, Paperback

First published March 15, 2011

About the author

Joshua Corey writes poetry, fiction, and criticism. Lately he's been writing science fiction novels!

His recent publications include:

- How Long Is Now (Spuyten Duyvil Publishing, 2022), a novel.
- Hannah and the Master (MadHat Press, 2021), poetry.
- The Transcendental Circuit: Otherworlds of Poetry (MadHat Press, 2018), criticism.
- Partisan of Things (Kenning Editions, 2016), a new translation (with Jean-Luc Garneau) of rancis Ponge's 1942 book of prose poems, Le Parti pris des choses,

He lives in Evanston, Illinois with his wife and daughter and is a Professor of English at Lake Forest College.

Reviews

[Leah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did not love this. A lot of it was much vaguer than I like my poetry, but it was worth it for the moments. Every so often (pretty often, in fact) Joshua Corey would pull out this amazing phrasing or image that would nail me right in the solar plexus and leave me gasping. That, my friends, is poetry.