
Binding: Paperback
Pages: 104ISBN: 978-1-73632-480-6
Anselm Berrigan is the author of numerous works. His most recent include Pregrets, Something for Everybody (Wave Books, 2018), and Come in Alone (Wave Books, 2016).
Pregrets by Anselm Berrigan
In the world of Anselm Berrigan sketchiness is next to godliness and repeated heavy-lifting becomes a pleasure. Pregrets has the fell of wandering a giant armory filled with enigmatic objects and pointed memories. Dust motes in daylight betray a thin path forward so the 'tongue' of the book seems in constant peril, addictively so. "red copter rises slicing a scraper into outer cubicle dreams..." Possessed of a haunted style that moves beyond surface. Fathomless
With Pregrets, Anselm Berrigan captures environs and tonal intrusions that compose thought-break as society—a reflection of the seemingly scattered populace, where the all is broken while becoming thought, "unity would like/its finked deproductions back." If we remove a cogent arc, the dips and peaks of our lives become weirdly accessible, where each observed indentation of skin on skin action becomes a jeweled aphorism, a telegrammed imagistic, from u to us—"I'm a covered base levitating carry-ons into sub-extinction." Berrigan synthesizes time's arrival as an act of pregret, by giving us regrets to degret from, now he's got me doing it! The breathless yet finite scrawl of these poems—ecosystems of empowerment that infuse the neighborhood walk with the centered page—re-train listening as a sort of ekphrasis of unfolding, to capture the journey's foundation with a delicate insistence on the everyday apogee found between the words, "being a thingless/telephat," of the poet to reader, "give my love to the air out there."
So Pregrets I figure at origins that already have some kind of affect/karma but don't have to add up. A huge relief. This work is all about duration and mind and space, and Time as spiral. Often like a dream text with that crazy "other" fluttering in wild tandem.