Something for Everybody

“The political arrives in pieces, settling across his sprawling poems like dew or debris. Berrigan has always matched his experimental drive with a personable quality.” —Boston Globe

Anselm Berrigan’s eighth collection of poems, Something for Everybody, is exactly as its title describes. Wide-ranging in forms, densities, and aesthetics—and written from numerous collaborations, prompts, and influences—these poems express poetry’s astonishing possibilities. At the same time, they evince this sin- gular poet’s consciousness in the here and now, as a family and community member looking at the seams of public life.

For consciousness the world is décor: sentences cast about
For bodies in the exuberant wobble factory Q-Bert believes
In me in the dark to pass out and check yourself out gliding
By storefront windows searching for a feeling no one’s felt
In the last twelve seconds lathered with coeval nightmare
Rhetoric of sociable extinction bashful as a wraith eking out
A line of image extract to sprinkle on a plenty reeling mind. . .

Anselm Berrigan is the editor of What is Poetry? (Just Kidding , I Know You Know): Interviews from the Poetry Project Newsletter (1983–2009), and is the author of many books of poetry, most recently Come In Alone and Primitive State. From 2003 to 2007 he was Artistic Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. He is Co-Chair, Writing at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts interdisciplinary MFA program and also teaches part-time at Brooklyn College.