About this item
Highlights
- "I wrote my experimental novel Reap Violet Hiss in my 20s through the 1970s in my East Village apartment.
- Author(s): Michael Cooper
- 316 Pages
- Fiction + Literature Genres, General
Description
Book Synopsis
"I wrote my experimental novel Reap Violet Hiss in my 20s through the 1970s in my East Village apartment. It is an abstract, almost cubist novel, where planes of thought intersect with one another, splicing life into constantly shifting images; it may also be read as a prose poem. Drawing upon my unconscious mind, I am a poet who wrote a novel. Just for you."
Review Quotes
I praise Michael Cooper's poetry as a life-long meditation that celebrates the contemporary possibility of poetic meaning itself. In a time when meaning seems to deliquesce through every attempt to evade or erase the moribund familiar, it is not merely comforting and consoling to read a poetry that, without a megaphone, proclaims that the post-post-post-modern impossibility of communicable, poetic meaning has been grossly exaggerated.
Charles Stein
I very much enjoyed and admired these poems-for their delicacy and tenderness, for the way they evoke the mutual permeability of person and world and person and person, for the delicate balance they strike between occlusion and transparency of vision. They remind me of Frank O'Hara's lovers "drifting back and forth/ between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles . . ." Thank you for entrusting me with them.
Ellen Levy
Michael Cooper is the poet of the little epiphanies of everyday life-a sensitive person who can find importance and beauty in what sometimes might seem mundane. Michael is not afraid to delve into sexuality, and
often writes rather detailed poetry that mirrors the feelings and behavior of physical love. This is genuine poetry, but rarely obscure. This doesn't mean it's simple, or perhaps superficial. What he has revealed to me is only a small amount of what seems like a lifetime of writing and contemplating reality with a poet's eye.
John Wherrity
I am eager to express my astonishment at Cooper's sensibility and love of language. Also his determination to see, feel, to squeeze, report, to blend, delve, to do all those things that celebrate noticing.
Paul Bernabeo