Deep Code

by John Coletti

In Deep Code, John Coletti explores "side language," as a subset of other languages, whether slang or metaphor, to both communicate and obfuscate. Combining a bent lyric perception with a fragmentation redolent of French cubism, Coletti portrays contemporary urban experience, from power relations and personal loss to nights among city dwellers recording their convivial distress, glad and dissolute at once.

John Coletti is the author of the book Mum Halo (2010) and co-author, with Anselm Berrigan, of Skasers (2012). He has served as editor of The Poetry Project Newsletter and co-edits Open 24 Hours Press.

Genres: Poetry

93 pages, Paperback

First published November 11, 2014

Reviews

[Nicholas Trandahl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Provoking modern abstractionism in poetic form. I didn’t want it to end.

[Dree · Rating 2 out of 5]

Have you ever read a book of poetry that reads like a bunch of in jokes among friends? That's what this felt like to me. I know plenty of the names--Maradonna, Griswold, LeBron. I know where Schenectady and Bayreuth are, and I know what a jelly roll quilt is. I know what a lot of the nouns are--and there are a lot of nouns, like KFC, Peugeot Lion, incisors, quick cement. But they are just lists of words. I am sure they male sense and are funny or meaningful to someone. Who, I have no idea (friends, family, other poets, people from a certain neighborhood, a school/work/generational cohort?).

A number of these poems (see: Deep Code, but there quite a few others as well) feel like they are about parenting, and the chaos and frustration that come from parenting small children. But that may be me reading into them what I get from the nouns. Given the description on the back cover--which I cannot fully understand--they are about "contemporary urban experience".