Joseph Massey: Areas of Fog
Published 15 April 2009
Paperback, 116pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $16
ISBN 9781848610521
One needs only to watch and listen in gratitude as poems informed by Bronk, Niedecker, Olson (to name a few), and the landscape of Humboldt County, California take shape "In the room / of a memory // of a room" in Joseph Massey's first full-length collection, Areas of Fog.
"Joseph Massey sees with a composer's eye and sings in a microtonality all his own. Syllable by syllable phenomena miraculously unfold. This is fantastic work, understated, charmed, and open. The world simply happens in these poems and its moments are tuned marvels. You don't want to miss it." —Peter Gizzi
"These are poems of ear and eye, full of echoes and luminous images. With a sensuality born of melancholy, they attend to resonant details that hover at the edge of recognition, as when Pacific fog partly obscures the view. Everywhere in the poet's language one feels the press ure of a phenomenal world. It comes through without argument or elaboration in vivid glimpses and radiant debris, saturated with Eros and loneliness." —Devin Johnston
"With Massey, you always know where you are. On a shoreline, near a sea, sharing the air with birds, the ground with odd bits of trash, a lover: it's Anywhere, but it's also Home. And it's that contradiction that gives his words their saudade. Is he a traveler, "in the early morning rain," as the old sad song goes? Or is he the faithful espouser of an environment that is coldly shifting around him, with its own will to change? Either way, these are the briefest of elegies for that moment clair-obscur, poems strong as spider silk or the corpus callosum." —Ange Mlinko
"These poems are unmediated, beautiful meditations that belong wholly and sparingly to this world. Massey is a master at finding a poem's measure in the particular details of a day's unfurling. He knows how to bind words together at a level of quiet intensity that lets them radiate through this Fog Area." —Pam Rehm
Read a blog review by Steven Fama here.
Read a blog review by Jack Boettcher here.
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