Blue Guide

by Stephen Yenser

Inspired by the miraculously mercurial potential of words, Stephen Yenser takes readers on a heady trip through a world full of promise yet compromised by human weakness. Set in sunny southern California and Greece, the poems of Blue Guide cast the shadow of mortality, and the tones are elegiac. This combination of the deadly serious and the exuberant is natural, Yenser notes; after all, work and orgy share the same etymological root, as do travail and travel , pledge and play .

Using various poetic modes, Yenser offers here a quatrain written to name a painting by Dorothea Tanning; a sequence of poems for his daughter; an excursive poem at once about Los Angeles and Baghdad and his father and a petty criminal; a group of prose poems set in penumbral bars; some postcards to a dead friend; and a meditation prompted by a sojourn on a remote Aegean island.  The most unexpected work is an assemblage of quotations and glosses in the tradition of the commonplace book, except that in Yenser's hands these entries are densely interrelated
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Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Justin · Rating 1 out of 5]

I hated this book. More than half the time I would finish a poem or a section and throw up my hands in disgust. The whole conceit is masturbatory, most of the poems are a series of descending sounds linked together, and the format is useless.

That is to say, I can't agree with his project's motivation at any point.

Yenser is obviously an accomplished writer but his aesthetic is so markedly incompatible with my own that it was essentially impossible for me to appreciate his skill and his apparent wit came off alternately self-satisfied and childish.