Books by Geoffrey G. O'Brien

Geoffrey G. O'Brien's third collection opens with a set of lyric experiments whose music and mutable syntax explore the social relations concealed in material things. O'Brien's poems measure the "e;vague cadence"e; of daily life, testing both the value and limits of art in a time of vanishing publics and permanent war. The long title poem, written in a strict iambic prose, charts the disappearance of the poetic into the prosaic, of meter into the mundane, while reactivating the very possibilities it mourns: O'Brien's prosody invests the prose of things with the intensities of verse. In the charged space of this hybrid form, objects become subjects and sense pivots mid-sentence into song: "e;The sun revolves around the earth revolves around the sun."e;