Bloom is the electrifying debut collection from one of our best emerging poets. If a studio technician could "remix" poems by modern and contemporary poets so they retold the story of the Manhattan Project from the viewpoint of Louis Slotin, simultaneously putting Robert Lowell in whispered conversation with Ted Hughes, as vocalized by a Canadian physicist from Winnipeg, over the current state of literary utopian projects, we'd hear something nearly as captivating as Michael Lista's Bloom. As it is, we also get "Lista" swimming ghostlike through this palimpsest-narrative, inhabiting Slotin and brashly "tickling the dragon's tail" at the nucleus of untested notions of creation, stasis, and destruction. In Bloom, one of the most dangerous historical fulcrums of the last century is somehow made viscerally present again, and, more wondrously, made to radiate outward into very current crises.
Bloom is the electrifying debut collection from one of our best emerging poets. If a studio technician could "remix" poems by modern and contemporary poets so they retold the story of the Manhattan Project from the viewpoint of Louis Slotin, simultaneously putting Robert Lowell in whispered conversation with Ted Hughes, as vocalized by a Canadian physicist from Winnipeg, over the current state of literary utopian projects, we'd hear something nearly as captivating as Michael Lista's Bloom. As it is, we also get "Lista" swimming ghostlike through this palimpsest-narrative, inhabiting Slotin and brashly "tickling the dragon's tail" at the nucleus of untested notions of creation, stasis, and destruction. In Bloom, one of the most dangerous historical fulcrums of the last century is somehow made viscerally present again, and, more wondrously, made to radiate outward into very current crises.
| Published By | House of Anansi Press Inc — Apr 3, 2010 |
| Specifications | 96 pages | 5.5 in x 8.5 in |
| Keywords | History; Canadian; oppenheimer; nuclear bomb; barbieheimer; christopher nolan; cillian murphy; |
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Excerpt |
| Written By | Michael Lista is the author of Bloom. He is also the Poetry Editor of The Walrus, and he writes a popular monthly column, On Poetry, for the National Post. Michael lives in Toronto. Follow Michael Lista on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/michaellista/ |
| Written By |
| Michael Lista is the author of Bloom. He is also the Poetry Editor of The Walrus, and he writes a popular monthly column, On Poetry, for the National Post. Michael lives in Toronto. Follow Michael Lista on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/michaellista/ |
Quill and Quire Books of the Year
Long-listed, ReLit Awards: Poetry, 2011
“Perfectly weighted.” —salon
“There is much to take from this collection. Not only is its face beautiful, its body yields clues both to the genetic makeup of poetry - the process of parenting and birthing it - and the purpose of life.” —Globe and Mail
“Bloom is all one might hope for in a book of poetry: an unencumbered, nervy fusion of imagination and form.” —Winnipeg Free Press