Aaron McCollough

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Biographical note:  Aaron McCollough is the author of one previous poetry collection, Welkin, published by Ahsahta Press in 2002, winner of the first annual Sawtooth Prize in Poetry. Aaron McCollough lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan with Suzanne Chapman.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844710034
ISBN-10:  1844710033
ISBN-13:  9781844710034
Author:  Aaron McCollough
Title:  Double Venus
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Jul-03
Extent:  108pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  7 mm
Weight:  162 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  Structured as a series of poetic arguments, essays, and visions, Double Venus seeks a suitable language for reconciling various styles of commitment. The collection is especially concerned with facing the call to individual accountability in the context of industrialized patriarchy even as it is counting the manifold blessings of life in that context. Thus, expressions of indignation are always sewn here with desire, fellow-feeling, creature comfort, and the knowledge that the Good Life may still hold some sweetness, even if it must always also be a “work of worry.” Double Venus oscillates between more and less open formal strategies in an explicit effort to bring the lyric into conversation with other discourses dedicated to ethical practice. Likewise, the collection meditates on the place of ethics in territories traditionally thought to be the special province of the lyric – on the place of the lyric in territories traditionally thought to be the special province of ethics.

Table of contents:
National Hotel
I Arguments & Spurious Links
Democrack Pistols
[org - a mild version]
The Anatomy of Melancholy
Eyelash
Poem for Jim Thorpe
Passenger Pigeon
Firing the Arrow
Memoranda (cc: Self and Soul)
Song for John Wesley
They Are as They Are
II Common Places
Common Places
III Essays and Visions
[log - a mild vision]
1.0 - himself
1.1 - walt
1.0 - himself
1.2 - a rube
1.3 - w.c. bryant & ( a rube)
1.0 - himself
1.4 - his will & his love:
Essay 1. A Day of Rest
Essay 2. A Day of Rest
Essay 3. A Day of Rest.
Essay 4. A Day of Rest
Essay 5. A Day of Rest
Trickster Hermeneutics
Time One
Stanza
Stanza
Stanza
Blues Matrix :: War Time
Shipwreck of the Singular
IV Double Venus
[(0.38+0.333i) ecumenon]
[(0.27+0.57i) american man and woman, election year]
[(0.39+0.22i) a hero and a patriot]
Resistance in the Materials
[(-0.62+0.43i) jack spicer]
[(0.28+0.54i) trustee]
[(-0.36+0.62i) raymond williams]
Coffee County Breakdown
[(-0.62+0.43i) nomas]
[(-0.72+0.35i) sunday morning, facing westward]
Line Changes
[(-1.03-0.34i) in the swash]
[(xx+xxi) williams island]
[(-0.12+0.74i) anathanthema]
Lefthanded of Blooming Late
Romanticism
Rhyme (Occident)
Eagle Mountain Breakdown
[(-0.5+0.56i) chang ming, july 1999]
[(-0.52-0.57i) summer: silhouette & continuum]

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Excerpt from book:  

National Hotel

the city in the poet
is a fact
the city on the island
a fiction

the shadow of the fumes
troubling the air
is a fleeting faction
swimming to the city

“beyond the sport”
and steel and leathern
fixings

touching
the battery and bedsprings
this is the nature
and habit of waiting

or not
daylight

the form of market
dentist   post
collapsible chair

all these locks without
the arguments

bees inside the paper tube
like crickets

Review quote:  Aaron McCollough knows that America and Thanatos are hiding something. His poetry uses all manner of devices, determined to find out what and where it is among concrete things and living creatures with their riotous emblems. And sings when a song is called for.

Alan Halsey

Review quote:  In Double Venus, Aaron McCollough fulfills a promise with a continuity, completes an errand with a deeper errand. Here is the Crashaw of us, crowned in jessamine. Here is a metaphysics we can use, now and in all the hap ahead.

Donald Revell