Atmospheric Conditions

by Ed Roberson

A winner of the 1998 National Poetry Series competition, selected by Nathaniel Mackey. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1557133921
• ISBN13: 9781557133922
• Release Date: October 1999
• Publisher: Green Integer
• Length: 102 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.0" x 7.5"

Customer Reviews

a state of matter between states of matter

This book will leave a splinter in your bedroom, jar you obvious. Roberson is provocative, hinges together surprising, insistent subjects--the experience of being black with the unpredictability of the cosmos; atmospheric forces with the force of psychological cruelty; Hiroshima's shadows with New York subway art--and the result is unhinging, the couch riven underneath the gravity of "none of the faces finishes / its song," for "gravity is in plainer language / where everything sinks in." Boldly political, Roberson asks what occurs to a person when presence is absence, whole the same as hole? When "location costs / when race costs schools / cost cost costs you / your choice?" These poems, which at times seem as if they are one long poem, loom "the very person of difference / fallen into / the hole of appearance." Roberson occupies fragments (formally and thematically), as if to simultaneously create and navigate the dislocation / disarticulation, which he, almost literally, embarks upon, "the crossless river." Again and again the language of being withheld from, contained in, of loss, surfaces: "A design in the halls that keeps failing;" "disappearance / into landscape;" "The polymaths of obliteration;" "blood homed in on the / heart's press;" "this nullification in the same / -ness of the unrelieved...;" "all my dances / lean against falling;" "I seem to know / what to do in the ashes." While reading, I felt as if I was in a state of matter between states of matter, where heat & pressure transmogrify the natural, somehow articulate the tirelessly tread upon, the mitigated. One poem, "Strata," suggests (by its title alone) the social, cultural & economic stratifications that so often make us feel as if we are breathing thin air, caught in "horizons' walls," inside of which the ocean [and so, the world] becomes "in what we float / but cannot drink." Disallow = disavow. If there is an imperative in this book for me, it is this: to understand that "stories architecturalize levels / of tolerance for what so / cannot be tolerated people die / trying / to get up / top," and "that what we cover / doesn't hide nor change us so much as / make us the assignment of witness"--to see the hollering here, "to find the shared / place."