IMPROVISATIONS by Vernon Frazer is Now in Print (fwd)

[Alan Sondheim]

(this is a beautiful work - Alan)



Subject: IMPROVISATIONS  by Vernon Frazer is Now in Print


Beneath the Underground Books is proud to announce the June 22, 2005 release of 
Vernon Frazer's IMPROVISATIONS. Frazer's innovative and critically acclaimed 
longpoem, sections of which previously appeared in book format, is available 
for the first time in its completed form.

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Vernon Frazer's relentless pursuit of truth is inspiring. Improvisations 
commands our attention. It is difficult to recognize a landmark work in a 
landscape of hype and craftsmanship, but Frazer's embrace and reconciliation of 
the conflicts between poetry and language result in a musical and visual 
harmony that other poets have long neglected or sought with less success. 
Improvisations is a work to learn from and to praise without hesitation.

- Michael Rothenberg


Through its sectional appearances Improvisations has consistently offered its 
readers a dizzying flight across textual geographies and social aporia. Now we 
can encounter and engage its full monumentality as a vast text whose verbal 
excess and vertiginous typographic variations mark a stunning moment in the 
history of gestural poetics. It is a true comment on what it is to not only 
live modernity but to actively engage it.

- Steve McCaffery

Improvisations will take its place in the modernist, postmodernist and 
alternative pantheon of masterpieces. Vernon Frazer presents us with a 'new 
physics' of poetic structure. It is not contingent upon any preconceptions of 
what poetry 'has been' or 'should be'. Its roots are far reaching and 
ubiquitously move rhizomically beneath the surface of the poetic page. It is 
there that Improvisations manifests its multi-dimensional, polyphonic, nonlocal 
music-of-the-spheres resonances, echoing down cerebral corridors and unfolding 
to the reader a synergistically limitless semantically rich poetic realm.

- Ric Carfagna

|'|'|' one-one rhythm intensity emergent language & new not form of bop prosody 
< the moments the heavy breathing dragging language where it won't speak but 
has to > this exciting brilliant igneous volcanism of insistent world 
glossolalia harnessed to < what the world said when the word spoke > you get my 
DRIFT "spot-time" Wittgenstein < about virtual language is about virtual 
particles < what the vacuum speaks > of this masterpiece: dipping in, 
constructs of solitons, shore-flecked language returning "all different" < did 
anyone write this < sure a machine DIDN'T "I am sure if language could speak, 
this is what it would say" > the _topography_ of language < Said of a word or 
mineral that solidified from molten or partly molten material, i.e. from magma; 
also, applied to processes leading to, related to, or resulting from the 
formation of such words. > shards of CONTINUUM language degree & incessant < 
you can get lost in The Big Sky < WHATEVER YOU do READ THIS BOOK > & knot form

- Alan Sondheim


ISBN 0-9745270-1-7 704 pages $45.00




Available from Baker and Taylor Books, The Book House, Inc, and your favorite 
online bookseller. Note: Barnes and Noble online is offering a special 
discount.