Bloodline: Selected Writings

Zen student, NEA grant recipient, Fulbright Fellow, trail-blazing genre-bender and accomplished poet and translator John High here reveals his Bloodlines: Selected Writings. Drawing on four books, High includes the critically acclaimed novel-cum-serial prose poem The Desire Notebooks, which resembles Anne Carson's novel in verse Autobiography of Red in its fragmented narrative and compression of mythic allusions and aesthetics with daily contemporary life. High moves from straight, sober syntaxes and slow lyric rhythms for his more narrative work, to a tumbling form that relies less on conventional punctuation to make sense and more on sound, restrained urgency, a sad playfulness and a rush of images and observations: ""finney intermittently swept up in this boat. the cargo carries rot oranges, tangerines, gnawed walnuts. cliffs obliterated in a blue heat. black steamers in the northern lights& these naked boys swimming on the shore. absence in the plot causes them to think of themselves."" ( Dec. 1)