Arias Let Into
2014, Spuyten Duyvil
In Arias Let Into, Joseph Cooper’s poems seek to contain the uncontainable, fear. Captured in a construction that is hard to identify, yet familiar all the same, this collection seeks to open up what is space, “from within echoing going fathoming geography.” The cycles of these prose-like poems create a choral effect that evokes fragments of honest reflection sparkling in musical concentration. In bold candors, expressive susceptibilities and lyrical integrity this work is imaginative, friendly and charmingly measured. “A hand offered is structureless as conflict from self-renewal.” Persuasively, these poems split open the spatial interpretation to engage and familiarize one with the presence of the poem and create something new and brilliant, alien. “With the hum and the hurry of this fragmentary utterance I fear cold prose.”
Geoffrey Gatza, author of Apollo: A Ballet
Geoffrey Gatza, author of Apollo: A Ballet
“I do not so much as write a book as move at will from one word to another.” Cooper is traversing a “tendency to pervert tweak”—not afraid of the essentials, the elemental words like love and lonesome, face, alter-egos, lip and chart he also willingly wills himself a laboratory where phrases are involved in a creeping and revealing spectrum. They gnaw and slide, they slither from gestation to full-on presence. Arias Let Into “believes authentic reality is empty-handed”—in desperate need of some tighter grip, some triggery tip, some gravitas gift by practicing graft as others might practice a religion. It’s all in here: psyche, body, surreal merges. These Arias are “ebullient comics” wherein “borrowed organs” become “cosmic hostage[s].” An obdurate can feel free to enter here. This is where an obdurate enters for nourishment.
j/j hastain, author of Graphomania
j/j hastain, author of Graphomania
Joseph Cooper invites you to navigate (at your own risk) this menagerie of mistaken landscapes and visceral interiors. Where carefully plotted courses are continuously warped and images are interrupted with cinematographic precision. Where every straight line shimmers and dissolves into a more organic topography of thought-in-motion. These spliced scenes of sex and domesticity, revelation and disguise, place and dislocation are deftly captured in prose-sonnet traps that give a nod to, then go beyond, Berrigan’s experiments in the form. By “stitching together the disparate imprisoned in symmetry” Cooper creates a series of panoramic depictions at once darkly magical and deeply practical, innocently pictorial and disconcertingly primordial.
Travis Macdonald, author of The O Mission Repo [Vol. 1]
Travis Macdonald, author of The O Mission Repo [Vol. 1]
for ordering details: https://www.createspace.com/
TOUCH ME
2009, BlazeVox Books
Touch Me is a stark and stunning inquest. Joseph Cooper offers a rich and penetrating view of a shattering love. Among lightning shapes of spaces, gentle word ways force wide this love exposing terrible wisdom through dialogic violence. Play the game. —Jane Werle, poet and educator
Touch Me (see also: violent rupturing of symbolic order) n. 1. title of an imbroglio of poetic genius and the second published work by Joseph Cooper, a singular voice calling out in the wilderness of 21st century American publishing. 2. a linguistic tool used in the vivisection of artifice and romantic love in order to expose their sexually deviant board game structuring beneath. 3. easily the most exciting and honest narrative adventure you will encounter anywhere. —Jamba Dunn, Novelist, Media Critic
For ordering info, please visit BlazeVox Books.
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AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A STUTTERER
2007, BlazeVox Books
In Autobiography of a Stutterer, Joseph S. Cooper has realized a beautifully timed sequence of works running through the double gates of lips and teeth, and faith and love. He arrives at the fabulous tongue, personal runway of language, and from there the words take off and return in a series of spasmodic flights that together comprise a breakthrough book. Like a new family member, please welcome it and enjoy its unpredictably bright and wide-eyed movements. -Reed Bye
Joseph S. Cooper’s, Autobiography of a Stutterer positions the reader (performer) in the liminal spaces between articulation and interruption, fluency and stuttering, the spaces between monologue and dialogue, language and body, in order to develop a narrative wholly engaging, critically poised, and deconstructive. It is no small accomplishment that this autobiography carries within it a specific subjectivity (the author’s) at the same time it stages the desubjectification of its readers/performers. This text allows you to lose yourself within it, as one ethical body encountering another. In fact it holds the potential to reveal how being a more ethically responsible human might be to do just that. -Jared Hayes
Joseph S. Cooper writes where the body does not exactly say yes but where it wants something else. By this I mean the bodies he is making are profoundly wild: propelled by phonetic imperatives and breaks in the deep structure that could be described as aberrant, but which I prefer to think of as delicious. What is a mouth and where is it going? I read his work as a future for the tongue, whether that's English, pre-English or the English that's dismayed and privately ashamed (in a good way) to find itself in such proximity to the teeth. I suggest wearing a gum-shield. I suggest serving Jell-O to your guests. Joseph S. Cooper is a genius and, to find out how the party really got going, I suggest you open this amazing, completely frightening book. -Bhanu Kapil
For ordering info, visit: BlazeVox Books or Small Press Distribution
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POINT OF INTERSECTION
2009, Fact-Simile Press
From the publisher: "Winner of Fact-Simile's first annual Equinox Chapbook contest, Point of Intersection is a 4.5 x 6.5 in. portfolio style chapbook consisting of 12 poems. Each reporter-style book is printed on hand-torn 120 gsm Arches Text Wove cotton-rag paper and hand-bound in scarred and branded leather. Point of Intersection is printed in an edition of 100 including a small run of vegan copies." (Currently sold out.)
* * * * *COLLABORATIVE TEXTS:
Here Come the Groovies (with Andrew K. Peterson)
Livestock Editions, Limited 2010
ABOUT THE GROOVIES...
...Joe says, "Working with Andy is always maniacally educational. His profound insight into humanity makes even the most mundane moments scintillate with creative energy. Andy is a writer whose poetic aspirations, while certainly emotionally charged and deeply personal, selflessly reveal our various relational symmetries through playful experimentalism and a journalistic interrogation of truth. Groovies deeply embodies his brilliance and inventiveness, as much of this text was composed on bar patios stealing observations and menu specials, riding shotgun while transcribing our absurd dialogues, storefront advertisements, and coffee house sessions with MuuMuu House diatribes. Every Goon visitation is an effort to encapsulate, often a year's worth of phone conversations, poetic invention, suppressed delight, into about four days. This particular Buffalo venture culminated in dozens of pages of work, one hangover after another and interminable laughter. Though, never before have our adventures so honestly depicted the madness of these encounters. Here Come the Groovies is a compilation of poems delivered truly by friendship, frenzy, and an insatiable desire for the poetic."
...Andy says, "Working with Joe is a delightfully maddening challenge, because Joe is a poet and lives that way with gusto. Joe's action-speech is always provocative and personal (therefore universal) and solicits meaningful and intimate conversation. About what you said, what he said, what you thought he said, what he thought he heard you say about what you thought about what he said, etc. Mostly this book blossomed during my recent visit to Buffalo, & unspools that experience in a variety of unconscious collaborative forms: personal poem, found language, minimalist dialogue, invisible imitation, notation's dream, and mystery text. I hope these poems capture honest, collapsible joys and exhaustions of a friendship fueled by poetry, presence (over distance) and other ephemeral substances. A kiss for good company."
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Blue in Circuits The Blood Can be Used:
Insuring the Wicker Man Shadow Created Delusion (with Jared Hayes)
Introduction by Bhanu Kapil
Hot Whiskey Press, 2005
A Human dissection manual cut-up feminist experiment illuminated text spine fluid processing. (Sold out).
