In his third full-length book of poems, Joshua Corey puts the sonnet to the test with this sequence of alternately fractured, ventilated, and unrhymed poems written in the aftermath of 9/11 while Corey was living at a pastoral remove from war and terror in upstate New York. The tension between idyllic personal circumstances and horrific world-historical events led Corey to produce this series of layered poems, variously sardonic and sincere in tone.

Joshua Corey was born in New York City, grew up in northern New Jersey, and graduated from Vassar College in 1993 then earned an M.A. in English literature and an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Montana. He was awarded a Stegner Fellowship in creative writing from Stanford University in 1999, and received his Ph.D. in English from Cornell University in 2007. He is the author of Selah (Barrow Street Press, 2003), Fourier Series (Spineless Books, 2005), and two chapbooks: Compos(t)ition Marble (Pavement Saw Press, 2006) and Hope & Anchor (Noemi Press, 2007).  He lives in Illinois and teaches at Lake Forest College.

Josh will read from and sign copies of Severance Songs on Saturday, March 12 at The Book Cellar in Lincoln Square, Chicago. Then, on April 20 from 4:00 - 6:00 p.m. in the Mohr Student Center at Lake Forest College, he will sponsor a student open mic and reading.

 

Advance praise for Severance Songs:

“Joshua Corey’s book of sonnets is formally playful and emotionally raw, with an intensity of expression that is at times harrowing… . It is indeed the suppleness of the poet’s voice, in concert with his loves, fears, and the voices that he has ‘stood upon,’ that makes Severance Songs such an extraordinary volume.” — Paul Hoover

“In Severance Songs, Joshua Corey tends to the always-mysterious border that connects the interior and the exterior.  Is one inside the tale if one alludes to it? Is the eye tethered as witness to what it sees? And who can avoid singing these ‘culpability cantos’? Yet if the lush Eden of intimacy foresees our later expulsion, this poet shows us how to stand at the garden’s threshold where ‘reaching builds on reaching.’ Corey risks the possible emptiness inherent in rupture to seek out the ways we are ‘knotted to one another’s possibilities.’ The architecture of the poem, he reveals, is replete with doors and windows and it is for us to discover whether we are looking in or looking out.”

— Elizabeth Robinson

“These songs shuttle between a past and a future, cast adrift or severed from a violent, ashen present into a necessary untimeliness, … What then of the sonnet, repository of desire and enemy of time? It is, as ever, that form by which we re-imagine subjectivity to confront altered circumstances, and to assess ‘the shipwreck of the singular’ in the maelstrom of the many… . (T)he poem is a skipping record of the effort ‘to be less alone,’ ‘to find an algorithm from inside mortal eyes.’ Yet the song itself is implicated, as is each citizen, in the mendacity and the war against meaning, since there is no ‘outside.’”

— Michael Palmer, from “On Joshua Corey” in Conjunctions

News Contact

Liz Libby
libby@lakeforest.edu
847-735-6011

Related Links:

• @joshcorey
• Josh Corey's blog