Breathing Place
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A01=Cal Bedient
Author_Cal Bedient
Category=DCC
Category=DCF
Category=VFJX
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Product details
- ISBN 9781632430823
- Weight: 182g
- Dimensions: 158 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 07 Nov 2020
- Publisher: Omnidawn Publishing
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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The poems in The Breathing Place, Calvin Bedient’s fifth collection of poetry, take in and move through three areas of consideration. Focusing first on the turmoil of an imperfect world before turning to raging social concerns, the poems finally come to find a refreshed sense of hope, offering spaces to pause and breathe in the world around us.
First the poet addresses “the limits of the containing air,” the atmosphere of a world that moves along a journey ever-farther from whatever Eden it began in. He walks us through the fear and bewilderment, the dips and bumps, the guilt of gazing and desire along a path pointed away from paradise. These poems take in the deep—even if unadmitted—resentment at having to live and breathe in an uninviting world, amid scorched earth, and in a human body that feels the burning of precariousness, anxiety, and grief. The second space calls us to breathe in the now, bringing attention to a troubled world where the atmosphere is filled with strongmen hungry for rivalry, with the stink of age-old inequalities, and where looming climate emergency and nuclear war hover over the waters. The poet finally leads us to green nature, to a space of freshness that somehow survives under threat. Here is the living flow of the senses, the wonders of art, and a renewed feeling of sublimity that thrills from earth to the heavens.
First the poet addresses “the limits of the containing air,” the atmosphere of a world that moves along a journey ever-farther from whatever Eden it began in. He walks us through the fear and bewilderment, the dips and bumps, the guilt of gazing and desire along a path pointed away from paradise. These poems take in the deep—even if unadmitted—resentment at having to live and breathe in an uninviting world, amid scorched earth, and in a human body that feels the burning of precariousness, anxiety, and grief. The second space calls us to breathe in the now, bringing attention to a troubled world where the atmosphere is filled with strongmen hungry for rivalry, with the stink of age-old inequalities, and where looming climate emergency and nuclear war hover over the waters. The poet finally leads us to green nature, to a space of freshness that somehow survives under threat. Here is the living flow of the senses, the wonders of art, and a renewed feeling of sublimity that thrills from earth to the heavens.
Calvin Bedient is professor emeritus at University of California, Los Angeles, is a founding editor of the New California Poetry series, and co-edits Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry & Opinion. He is the author of several collections of criticism, including Eight Contemporary Poets, He Do the Police in Different Voices: The Waste Land and its Protagonist, and The Yeats Brothers and Modernism’s Love of Motion in addition to the poetry collections Candy Necklace, The Violence of the Morning, Days of Unwilling, and The Multiple. He lives in Santa Monica, California.
