Description
Mark Dow's Plain Talk Rising opens when a boy opens his eyes to his mother's already-inescapable presence. It ends with the possibility of endlessness when the mother touches her own pregnant belly and "for the first time he knows she knows he is there."
David Rosenberg (author of A Literary Bible and co-author with Harold Bloom of The Book of J) writes that Plain Talk Rising "transmutes poetry into prose, and then back again, like an alchemist let loose in a writing workshop that may set alight our era of MFA's for good."
The New Haven Review says that Plain Talk Rising is "able to make us feel our lived-in time and a kind of eternal time. . . . Dow's brilliant wordplay is equal to the stringent -- and playful -- task he sets himself."
Sentences, stanzas, lines, words, and even individual letters are forms which "make a man feel trapped and free." Syntax touches and delineates objects, ideas, and emotions evenly. "What's most invisible's the main thing, after all."
"Does everyone fight something without form, / something formless, I mean, something parsed / to powder mistaken for nothing while meanwhile / slipped above the radar and re-forming itself on / a wider perimeter, formlessness notwithstanding, / or is that just me?"
Before being "self-published," Plain Talk Rising was a finalist in the Colorado Prize, New Issues, and Yale Series competitions. It was a semi-finalist for the St. Lawrence Book Award from Black Lawrence Press. The poems in Plain Talk Rising were written between the mid-1980s and early 2000s.
Read more about the book on the Agni blog ("Dick Talk," Sept. 3, 2018).
Dow's poems and nonfiction have appeared in a variety of print and online journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Chicago Review, Conjunctions, Drunken Boat, Fascicle, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Paris Review, Pequod, PN Review, SLAM! Wrestling, Threepenny Review, and 3: AM Magazine.
A graduate of Yale University and the University of California at Irvine, Dow is also the author of American Gulag: Inside U.S. Immigration Prisons (California, 2004).
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[Erratum: Some copies of Plain Talk Rising may require the following correction: on p. 14, the penultimate line of the second stanza should read: ". . . To remember and forget are not two opposite acts here".]
Product Details
| Publisher | PTR (New York) |
| Publish Date | September 01, 2018 |
| Pages | 60 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Paperback / softback |
| EAN/UPC | 9780692107966 |
| Dimensions | 8.3 X 5.5 X 0.1 inches | 0.2 pounds |
About the Author
Reviews
"A truly remarkable and challenging book." --Laurence Lieberman, author of The Creole Mephistopheles and Beyond the Muse of Memory: Essays on Contemporary American Poets
"Mark Dow's Plain Talk Rising hovers above poetry and prose. It also transmutes one into the other. 'The past, alight, hovers nearby with open eyes.' You will simply have to find your seat in the dark theater without flashlight or usher. Once seated, you will begin to identify with the author seated at his desk, dropping down the words toward the white landing area below. 'Oh and another thing.' (He is talking to you). The words stay there, falling into place when you have closed this unforgettable book, funny and wise." --David Rosenberg, author of A Literary Bible and co-author (with Harold Bloom) of The Book of J
"Mark Dow's Plain Talk Rising is a vivid performance of a self-aware poetics, able to make us feel our lived-in time and a kind of eternal time, addressing the world as a state of mind and a land of language to be mined for what value we can find. Dow's brilliant wordplay is equal to the stringent -- and playful -- task he sets himself. His themes, of creation, identity, and the mystery of our sex-engendered existence, reference a possible mythos while always keeping poesis as the wildcard up the sleeve of meaning." --Donald Brown, "One Man's Surface," NewHavenReview.com (January 16, 2019)
"Sounds and segues, shifts and (in)directions. Its plain talk keeps rising, leveling off and then soaring. One is sometimes caught between a giggle and a sob. Poetry as distilled, as distillate. So fine." --Judith Scherer Herz, editor, John Donne and Contemporary Poetry
"'Children make up the rules / and mean it and change them as they go, ' [Dow] says in the long poem 'Between the Lines and Above the Gaze, Which is a Phrase of Mallarmé's, ' and one gets the feeling he adopts this approach too. . . . On one level this is a book of plain talk, but plain talk that moves 'further into form' than that might suggest." --Rupert Loydell, "Forces in Motion," Stride magazine, U.K. (May 7, 2019)
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