Don't Forget to Love Me - by Anselm Berrigan (Paperback)

About the Book

"In his latest collection, Don't Forget to Love Me, Anselm Berrigan is at his most intimate, allowing us to tag along through the immediate histories of present moments in poems that were primarily written at the height of the pandemic. In reading these poems, we are permitted to witness their creation, as Berrigan pivots between semiotic slippage and shrewd assertions, letting the form of each poem take shape as it will, a surprise of sound and sight. In one poem he writes that "poetry / contains / multiple / unresolvable questions / A T / TH E / SLAME / TLIME" and later reminds us "there are / no accidents / in poetry / either." With the same acerbic wit found in Berrigan's previous work, Don't Forget to Love Me is an apogee of politics, pathos, and poetics"--

Book Synopsis

In his latest collection, Don't Forget to Love Me, Anselm Berrigan is at his most intimate, allowing us to tag along through the immediate histories of present moments in poems that were primarily written at the height of the pandemic. In reading these poems, we are permitted to witness their creation, as Berrigan pivots between semiotic slippage and shrewd assertions, letting the form of each poem take shape as it will, a surprise of sound and sight. In one poem he writes that "poetry / contains / multiple / unresolvable questions / A T / TH E / SLAME / TLIME" and later reminds us "there are / no accidents / in poetry / either." With the same acerbic wit found in Berrigan's previous work, Don't Forget to Love Me is an apogee of politics, pathos, and poetics.

Review Quotes

For Brooklyn poet Anselm Berrigan, the political arrives in pieces, settling across his sprawling poems like dew or debris. Berrigan has always matched his experimental drive with a personable quality...
--Michael Brodeur, Boston Globe

Anselm Berrigan's voice continues be one of the most refreshing in contemporary American poetry, for its singular welding of candor, political awareness, and humor that attempts, with a very high rate of success, to co-opt the commercial and political jargon of our times to return it to higher purposes...
--Virginia Konchan, Galatea Resurrects

Anselm Berrigan's free radical poetry chops your hands off mid-line, drops the book into your lap, and caresses you with disquiet indie pop allusions and echoes of ubiquitous advertising absurdities as it cheers on that last ill-intentioned pint before the crestfallen exit from the pub on a Monday night while ambitiously and unambiguously telling you it might not be OK, but I wouldn't know anyway.
--Jason Eric Jensen, The Brake Lights

About the Author

Anselm Berrigan is the author of many books of poetry: Pregrets, (Black
Square Editions, 2021), Something for Everybody, (Wave Books, 2018), Come In Alone (Wave Books, May 2016), Primitive State (Edge, 2015), Notes from Irrelevance (Wave Books, 2011), Free Cell (City Lights Books, 2009), Some Notes on My Programming (Edge, 2006), Zero Star Hotel (Edge, 2002), and Integrity and Dramatic Life (Edge, 1999). He is also the editor of What is Poetry? (Just Kidding, I Know You Know): Interviews from the Poetry Project Newsletter (1983-2009) and co-author of two collaborative books: Loading, with visual artist Jonathan Allen (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2013), and Skasers, with poet John Coletti (Flowers & Cream, 2012). He was the poetry editor for The Brooklyn Rail from 2008 through 2023. With Alice Notley and Edmund Berrigan he co-edited The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (U. California, 2005) and the Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan (U. California, 2011). More recently, he co-edited Get The Money! Collected Prose of Ted Berrigan (City Lights, 2022) with Notley, Edmund Berrigan, and Nick Sturm. A member of the subpress publishing collective, he has published books by Hoa Nguyen, Steve Carey, Adam DeGraff, and Brendan Lorber. From 2003-2007 he was Artistic Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church, where he also hosted the Wednesday Night Reading Series for four years. He teaches writing classes at Pratt Institute and Brooklyn College, and was a longtime Co-Chair in Writing at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts interdisciplinary MFA program. Berrigan was granted an Individual Artists Award from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts in 2017, and was also awarded a 2015 Process Space Residency by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and a Robert Rauschenberg Residency by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in 2014. He was a New York State Foundation for the Arts fellow in Poetry for 2007, and has received three grants from the Fund for Poetry.