Allen Grossman: Morris identifies a crisis which forms our lives, but has
had no poetic voice until this “diary”. Morris’s subject is the tornado moment between youth
and age when the self that speaks comes upon the language of the world he must live in—
and finds it a language utterly inescapable, but inadequate to desire. This book does what
poetry should do. It adds a voice to our voice.
To borrrow one of Daniel Morris’s titles, these are “Poem(s) Written in the Logic of Late
Capitalism”: smart, sassy, self-reflexive, satiric, and strangely soulful. And to borrow a line
from one of these poems, Morris is “a prophet to Gnostics in a knowledge econonomy”:
Post-Language, Post-NY School, and (of course) Post-Postmodern. Poetry rediscovers itself
as play in this work. And such play is always pleasure.—Norman Finkelstein
The poems in Daniel Morris’s fine collection are not temperate, restrained, or careful, and
that is the first reason I am grateful for them: these lyrical narratives are shaped by voice
and the urgent substance that caused them to be written. Each line is a high-speed search
through charged silence rather than an amble along a pre-imagined, or formal path;
each line can lead to places that are revelatory, wholly unexpected, and possessed of a
surprising clarity. The second reason for my gratitude is that the compassionate intelligence
that guides Morris’s work adds to these poems the constant reminder that language belongs
to all of us, and that, as we can know from the work of Mallarme and Whitman, the poet’s
job, for each generation, is to restore it to its rightful owners.— Chuck Wachtel
Daniel Morris’s poetry has appeared in Agni, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Western Humanities Review, Southern Humanities Review, River City, and other journals. Associate
Professor of English at Purdue University, Morris has published scholarly books on William Carlos Williams and on how contemporary American authors have responded to modern
painting. He lives in West Lafayette, Indiana with his wife, Joy, and young sons, Isaac and Aaron.
ISBN 0-9724785-7-4 $10.00
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