Into It Poems

Strikingly contemporary new work by an acclaimed poet Into It, Lawrence Joseph's fourth book of poems, is as bold a book as any in American poetry today-an attempt to give voice to the extremes of American reality in the time since, as Joseph puts it, "the game changed." Joseph's first three books dramatized the challenge of maintaining one's self in a world in the hold of dehumanizing forces. The new book finds him in a time and place where "the immense enlargement / of our perspectives is confronted / by a reduction of our powers of action"-where the word "wargame" is a verb and "the weight of violence / is unparalleled in the history / of the species." Along the New York waterfront, on a crowded street, at the site where the World Trade Center stood: Joseph enters into these places to capture the thoughts and images, the colors and feelings, and the language that give the present its pressured complexity. Few contemporary writers have been able to shape this material into poetry, but Joseph has done so masterfully-in poems that are daring, searching, and classically satisfying. Into Itis a new work by a poet of great originality and scope. Lawrence Joseph'sCodes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos: Poems 1973-1993will be published in paperback in September. He lives in downtown Manhattan and is a professor of law at St. John's University School of Law. Into It, Lawrence Joseph's fourth book of poems, is as bold a book as any in American poetry today--an attempt to give voice to the extremes of American reality in the time since, as Joseph puts it, "the game changed." Joseph's first three books dramatized the challenge of maintaining one's self in a world in the hold of dehumanizing forces. The new book finds him in a time and place where "the immense enlargement / of our perspectives is confronted / by a reduction of our powers of action"--where the word "wargame" is a verb and "the weight of violence / is unparalleled in the history / of the species." Along the New York waterfront, on a crowded street, at the site where the World Trade Center stood: Joseph enters into these places to capture the thoughts and images, the colors and feelings, and the language that give the present its pressured complexity. Few contemporary writers have been able to shape this material into poetry, but Joseph has done so masterfully--in poems that are daring, searching, and classically satisfying. "Though Joseph invokes Wallace Stevens, another lawyer, in his epigraph and elsewhere, the voice that dominatesInto It. . . recalls the weary, edgy voices of T .S. Eliot's personae making their way to be writing ahead of actual events, and that makes him one of the scariest writers I know."--David Kirby,The New York Times Book Review "For loss, bliss, and outrage met and endured, try Lawrence Joseph'sInto It. Joseph, who lives near Ground Zero and had to be evacuated in the aftermath of 9/11, gives us our urban world anew, pressing words till they sing of both justice and mercy. He rescues us from smudge."--Marie Ponsot,Commonweal "A poetry that can simultaneously think about and resist contemporary unreality . . . offering a kind of rigorous meditation on history and the self's ability to thrive."--Lisa M. Steinman,Michigan Quarterly Review "Few poets work so intensely to provide a tapestry of how malevolent public forces work upon us."--Allan M. Jalon,San Francisco Chronicle "Though Joseph invokes Wallace Stevens, another lawyer, in his epigraph and elsewhere, the voice that dominates