(OUTSIDE) by Todd Baron 80 pages ISBN 0-939691-11-6 $9.95 Cover by Oona Ratcliffe
![]()
"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."-- Leslie Scalapino
"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."-- Aaron Shurin
"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.'"-- Mary Margaret Sloan
"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."-- Norma Cole
return to Avenue B