To and from: (New)

Poetry. African American Studies. Quilting, quoting, and sampling, Patterson sets a flux of impression, emotion, and articulation into vertiginous blank-verse sonnets. The intention of these fine poems is to be found in the title TO AND FROM. Each poem is surrounded by an arcana of words (mostly commonplace) gleaned from other poets' poems, words that when strung together slide into the poem by Patterson himself. His poems are addressed to a mercurial, form-changing You. The result is paradoxically impersonal, transcending individual and place. One line captures the whole process: 'That loss you know might become anyone.'--Fanny Howe.

About the Author :
Poet, critic, and translator G. E. Patterson grew up along the Mississippi River and was educated in the mid-South, the Midwest, the Northeast, and the western United States. His collections of poetry include To and From (Ahsahta Press, 2008), and his first book, Tug (1999), won the Minnesota Book Award. Patterson's awards include fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Cave Canem, the Djerassi Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the Minnesota State Arts Board. After living in the Northeast and on the West Coast, he now makes his home in Minnesota, where he teaches.

Review :
"In this wonderful book, perception's ecstatic transit is lovingly engaged, and the distance between to and from opens into endless possibility. Companioned by the speech of the Western tradition old and new, these poems negotiate 'how . . . we long to think in terms of wholes' and foreground what Ann Lauterbach has called 'the whole fragment' available in an instant/instance. Aggression can't live in the world G.E. Patterson envisions in this book. We are lucky to have a poet of such tenderness among us." --Claudia Keelan "The intention of these fine poems is to be found in the title To and From. Each poem is surrounded by an arcana of words (mostly commonplace) gleaned from other poets' poems, words that when strung together slide into the poem by Patterson himself. His poems are addressed to a mercurial, form-changing You. The result is paradoxically impersonal, transcending individual and place. One line captures the whole process: 'That loss you know might become anyone.'" --Fanny Howe "To and From is a colloquy that finds the 'I' in conversation with other selves: with the beloved, the landscape, and the language. In particular, each discrete and sinuous fourteen-line composition bears--in the supra-title space that might be taken as the back of the poem's mind, or the tip of its tongue--the traces of other writers. These words and names are incantations of friendship. G.E. Patterson's poetry flows back and forth through these citation/salutations, giving meaning to the fragments as it receives meaning from them, touching into realms of humor, melancholy, sardonic observation and dreamy embodiment. His perfect lines drift at the speed of breath." --Frances Richard