Synopsis
Shaped by an effortless breath line, Joanne Kyger's poetry is gifted with exquisite sensory awareness, a landscape painter's eye, and friendly compassion. It conducts an intimate debate on the process of language, always with a wonderful sense of humor, sometimes self-deprecating, sometimes excoriating the bad behavior of miscreants and proponents of a false culture. This long-awaited collection spans a decade of daily life, death, seasons, bird migrations, journeys—and the who, what, where, even the why of conscious human puttering. An active presence in the San Francisco Bay Area poetry scene for forty years, Joanne Kyger was one of the few women involved with the Berkeley Renaissance, a constellation of writers around Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, James Broughton, and Robin Blaser. One of the pioneers of American Zen, she remains a practicing Buddhist, and her poetry radiates the shapely art of a shapely mind.
"She's one of our hidden treasures—the poet who really links the Beats, the Spicer Circle, the Bolinas poets, the New York School, and the Language poets, and the only poet who can be said to do all of the above."—Ron Silliman