| (OUTSIDE) | ||
| by Todd Baron | ||
| 80 pages | ISBN 0-939691-11-6 | $9.95 |
| Cover by Oona Ratcliffe | ||
return to Avenue B
"Todd Baron's poems in (OUTSIDE) have a clarity that is not being either
speech or thought while seeming the reverberation of `the public' from inside
`someone,' not lines or rhythms or even/ anything from the outside but
on paper from the voice above the water-level/ shouting something
beneath. The sense of the poems' shape crosses a spatial line or level they
make that is public/interior."
"The tension, the negotiation of sets: inside / outside, here and now, of the
thing and its thing-word, of the word and its word-thing -- this struggle
articulates, here, lyrically. There is volubility and there are the
cross-silences of perplixity, `motion position past certainty / oriole yellow
plumed various unoccupied name.' The body is here, signing to the signs it
encounters, so the writing is sensual and flourishes as it searches. Such
restless yet grounded foliating attention makes me a happy reader."
"Ouside where? This is writing of speculative poise at the brink of
`the narrow regions,' word and world's divide where appearances flare in
`corrected harmonies, like a fountain in the light alone,' and lead through
reveries of sonic measure to the literal page. Here the spirit of Bartleby
presides: obdurate substantive presence resists vocal entreaty but `what seeks
to be lost,' still `needing paper,' will `recognition "re-unite" asunder.'"
"Suppose that the inside coheres in actions such as `wanting' or `reading,'
`repeating' and `arriving.' But everything arrives through the telling, which
involves reading, writing, reading and listening. In the `dusk-colored dusk,'
hear the rustle of pages turning. What's concealed and ideas of description
and explanation meet sensibly in the nature of Todd Baron's OUTSIDE."