Synopses & Reviews
Poetry. THE YEAR OF THE ROOSTER offers in its title work a kinetic, convulsive, epic poem that explores and explodes through slippery, circumspect pronouns expectations of gender, the authority of artifice, the act of looking, and the action of thought. Is the rooster a trope? Is he a trooper? Maybe he's a she and she's the expectation of masculine bravado he's trying to unmask. Part action painting, part abstract estrangement, part enactment of the artist's uncertainty about all things art, the weird world of this poem is forever in flux, off-kilter, unanswerable. Planting bullets in the flowerbed of the sonnet, "Diminishing Returns" and "Returning Diminishments," two extended, meditative yet humorous suites, bookend the title poem.
About the Author
Noah Eli Gordon is the co-publisher of Letter Machine Editions, an editor for The Volta, and an assistant professor in the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he currently directs Subito Press. His recent books include THE YEAR OF THE ROOSTER (Ahsahta Press, 2013), THE SOURCE (Futurepoem Books, 2011), and Novel Pictorial Noise (Harper Perennial, 2007). His essays, reviews, creative nonfiction, criticism, and poetry appear widely, including journals such as Bookforum, Seneca Review, Boston Review, FENCE, HAMBONE, and in the anthologies Postmodern American Poetry (W. W. Norton and Co., 2013), A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line (University of Iowa Press, 2011), Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (Northwestern University Press, 2011), Poets on Teaching (University of Iowa Press, 2010), and Burning Interiors: David Shapiro's Poetry and Poetics (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007). An advocate of small press culture, he penned a column for five years on chapbooks for Rain Taxi Review of Books, ran Braincase Press, and was a founding editor of the little magazine Baffling Combustions. He lives in Denver with Sommer Browning and their daughter, Georgia.