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In his first collection, Joshua Clover presents a harrowing poetic manifesto for the coming century. Clover fuses formal control, a solid grounding in poetic tradition (his allusions range from Shakespeare to Dickinson to John Cale), and sheer visionary exhilaration into a technical, moral, aesthetic, and imaginative lexicon that irradiates each page. The eerie cyberglow of Clover’s lines illuminates a pageant of blurred and fragmented desolation: the Bomb, death camps, the Persian Gulf War, the beating of Rodney King, the whole numbing litany of modern horrors. Clover is a master of poetic shorthand, of the stark, unnerving image as immediate as yellow tape at a crime scene. Madonna anno domini is a sacrament for the twilight of the atomic age, a hellish Interzone with “God in abeyance” where dazed speakers search through the vertigo of negation for love and belief. And here, in this utterly convincing vision of a world whose center has long since lost its hold, we see the life on whose brink we, at the end of the millennium, find ourselves poised.
Joshua Clover has published poems in literary magazines such as American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, New American Writing, Threepenny Review, and Volt, and he received an NEA fellowship in 1994. He lives in Berkeley, California.
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