FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

“Joshua Weiner's new book is a wonderful example of how politics and art can come together in a way that is wholly unexpected.… But these poems in their prescience also transcend the category of political poems: they are works of original perception, poetic skill, and genuine strangeness. This is a wonderfully mature and original book.”
TOM SLEIGH

From the Book of Giants
Joshua Weiner

Joshua Weiner's first book, The World's Room, established the poet as a powerful new voice in American letters, earning him a Whiting Writers' Award and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Weiner returns here with From the Book of Giants, a book of verse that pushes past the barricades of difference, exclusion, false notion, and orthodoxy.

Taking its title from a set of writings found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, From the Book of Giants retunes the signal broadcast from these ancient fragments, transmitting a new sound in the shape of a Roman drain cover, in imitations of Dante and Martial, in the voice of a cricket and the hard-boiled American photographer Weegee, in elegies both public and personal, and in poems that range from the social speech of letters to the gnomic language of riddles. Out of poetry's "complex of complaint and praise," Joshua Weiner discovers, in one poem, his own complicity in Empire during his son's baseball game at the White House. In another, an embroidered parrot sings a hermetic nursery rhyme to an infant after 9/11. The call for a five-minute silence throughout Europe in memory of those slain by Spanish guerillas triggers a meditation on the difficulties of responding to historical tragedy. And in a daring longer poem set in Berkeley, Weiner explores the relationship between political and aesthetic commitments and acts of self-invention.

Joshua Weiner is assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland. He lives in Washington, D.C.

 

Joshua Weiner is available for interviews. For more information, please contact Stephanie Hlywak at (773) 702-0376 or sxh@press.uchicago.edu