Distributed for Omnidawn Publishing, Inc.
The Multiple
Calvin Bedient’s fourth collection, The Multiple, meets an unspeakably excessive reality with an unremitting intensity of its own. The "multiple" in question is the imbroglio of entwinements and failed copulas within us and all around us, the reality underlying and giving the lie to our stereotypes. Dazzlingly resourceful—witty, multi-tonal, musical, propositional, painterly—the poems thump the increasingly empty box of cultural goods, an inheritance that isn’t really ours. We are left with a naked need for creativity in a cosmos whose gift of time is a gift of chaos. If in a universe that is "not-one . . . the rhapsodic is the avenue to the truth," as Alain Badiou says, the quality of the rhapsodic in The Multiple is as cacophonous and unforgiving as it is lyrical and hooked. The truth is extreme, this aggressively uncensored book says, as it battles to give equal power to a savage voice and a soaring voice. Strong in their invisible architecture, these are poems of wild openness and sheer aliveness.
Table of Contents
After Bronzino • Propagation of the Elements • Evening in the Company of Undecided Birds • Rapid Dolly • Congratulations, Birds that Sleep All Night without Once Falling out of the Trees • Deception Falls • Virility Wrapped in an Army Blanket by a Campfire under the Bridge in Winthrop, Washington • War, a Problem • Stud Whiskers • “I Came out of Habitations where Warmth Filled My Feet and Loins” • Multitude • Rubbing the Hairs on the Back of a Man’s Thigh • There Are as Many Universes as There are Phrases • The Gordon Stewart Northcott Murders of Boys in Wineville, California, 1928 • The Roses of Your Dementia • Nipples Encircled with Clauses • Floating Ant • Bridge of Hair • Rays of the Territory • the breathing place • The Obscurity of the Ten Dresses • Season Luce Arrives • A Storm of Commas Was Coming • Whose Day? • Turning Aside from the Vulgar to Think • Everything Suck Big Suck Big Six Buttons • “Schubert on the Water, Mozart in the Din of Birds” • “Sonata, What Do You Want of Me?” • “Millions of Strange Shadows on You Tend” • Sheer • Cheetah • Witness Said He Saw the Defendant Beaming Defendant Was Alone at the Time • Hippo, the Logic of this Music, to Walk on the Bottom of Such Copia • each bound of the fiery paper • Propagation in the Foot, Leg, Arm, and Trunk Positions of Ballet • Many at the Source • The Partridge in Me • Va, Pensiero • Mine and Not Mine This Happiness, Sucked up into the Nobody Dark • Nude Shivering as He Leaves the Studio