Charles Bernstein; Republics of Reality 1975-1995

Series No.: SMC 120

ISBN: 1-55713-304-2, Pages: 376

American Literature, Poetry

A Sun & Moon title.

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Part of 50: A Celebration of Sun & Moon Classics

Recognized internationally as one of the major forces of contemporary poetry, Charles Bernstein—formerly the David Gray Professor of Poetry and Letters at the State University of New York, Buffalo—is now a professor of Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Bernstein co-founded L=A-N=G=U=A=G=E magazine in the late 1970s, giving rise to what has come to be called “Language” poetry.

However, as these poems reveal, Bernstein's allegiance has not been to any one kind of poetry, but to an “artificed” writing that refuses simple absorption into the society around it. Including the complete poems of early books such as Parsing, Shade, Senses of Responsibility, Resistance, and The Absent Father in Dumbo, as well as new work (collected here as Residual Rubbernecking), Republics of Reality is one of Bernstein's most important collections to date, revealing his great diversity and the witty, quirky, comic, philosophic, and lyric quality of his poems.

See also the author's Interview with Romina Freschi in Green Integer Review Issue No. 1.