Thursday, January 7, 2021

Bryce Warnes reviews Dennis Cooley's i see i said (2020) at The Pamphleteer


Bryce Warnes was good enough to provide a first review for Dennis Cooley's i see i said (2020) over at his brand-new site, The Pamphleteer. Thanks so much! You can see his original review here. As he writes:

Dennis Cooley | above/ground press | Ottawa, 2020

Staple bound, 20 pages | Purchase


Keep your eye on the ball—changeups abound: Between you and I, sight and sound, left field experiments and lyrical crowd pleasers. Centrepiece “take me out to the ball game” prosily puns upon a dugout lexicon—”I’m a bit wild on the mound, it’s true,” admits the speaker—to deliver an ars knuckleball. Elsewhere, the titular poem belongs to a suite of stuttering dialogues, woven throughout, that unstitch subjectivity. And the playful “chimera” picks apart our urge “to say what we would / say if we knew / what we thought / or what we thought / we could say / to one another.” Who’s on first?

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