A companion to the critically acclaimed My Way, his 1999 montage of essays, conversations, and poems, With Strings catapults Charles Bernstein into the future of American poetry. A compilation of sixty-nine poems in various forms and styles, dating mostly from the 1990s, With Strings is his most buoyant collection to date. With its fractured nursery rhymes, distressed mottoes, runcible riddles, and inscrutable sayings, Bernstein takes us on a poetic trip that swerves from the comic to the political, from the whimsical to the elegiac. The whole presents a densely sounded echo chamber in which a range of themes, moods, and perceptions extend and reverberate.

Charles Bernstein is perhaps best known as one of the founders of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry movement of the 1970s. He remains one of America's liveliest advocates and practitioners of radically inventive poetry. The title of his new collection, With Strings, suggests the lush arrangement of a musical work as well as the unacknowledged implications of our everyday agreements. Just as language binds us together with its associated meanings, With Strings bounces against the ties that rend us apart as they fasten us together. From his samplings of everyday life, to his demented yet sonorous iambic beats, Bernstein has once again created a poetry of our time, for our time, and by our time.

Charles Bernstein is the David Gray Professor of Poetry and Letters at the State University of New York at Buffalo. In addition to My Way: Speeches and Poems, he is the author of two collections of essays, A Poetics and Content's Dream, and more than twenty books of poems, including Islets/Irritations and Republics of Reality: 1975-1995.

In Place of a Preface a Preface

Thinking I Think I Think

Ballad of Blue Green Plate

Fiddle of the Rat Faced Men

Total Valor

But Pharaoh Did Not Listen to Moses

Two Places at Once

Captain Cappuccino and His Merry Con Leches

From Talk Alone You Don't Get a Poem

Immanuel Can't but Sammy Can

In Between

Polynesian Days

Nickey, Turn Off the Lights (2)

The Age of Correggio and the Carracci

Poem

Like This

The Impunity of Garden Flowers

Johnny Cake Hollow

The Manufacture of Negative Experience

The Knees Have It

The Human Abstract

Poem Composed for Jackson Mac Low

Doggy Bag

The Throat

Anaffirmation

Little Orphan Anagram

Common Stock

The Smell of Cheap Cigars

Max Weber's Favorite Tylenol for Teething

American Boy with Bat

Cover Up Me for I Cannot Myself Cover

Echo Off (Use Other Entrance)

Lily's Dream

Continuity of Affiliation/Disabling Capacity

Memories

The Emotional Truth

Circumstraint

Your Ad Here

Empty Biscuits

If Gif Were a Place

Ruminative Ablution

Today's Not Opposite Day

Peanut Butter and Jellyfish

Mr. Matise in San Diego

Egg Under My Feet

Low Regrets

It's Always Fair Measure

Breastworks

Besotted Desquamation

O! Li Po!

Contagious Proximity

Windows 95

Pinot Blanco

My God Has an Attitude Problem

The Holler

The Inevitable Flow of Material Things Through the Pores of the Years

Hoods and Scatters

These Horses Do Not Move Up and Down

The Stepmother's Hunger

"This Us Is Only ..."

Ms. Otis Regrets

The Boy Soprano

No More Cartwheels Off the Dock

Frequently Unasked Questions

Inturpitude

Why We Ask You Not to Touch

Make It Snappy & That's Final

Sprung Monuments

This Poem Intentionally Left Blank

Log Rhythms

Notes and Acknowledgments