Bøger af Rob Winger

An astonishing new collection of poems that question perception, meaning, and context.How does private thinking align with public action? And what might it mean to intend something anyhow? To name our particulars? To translate from the personal to the communal, the pedestrian to the universal? In Rob Winger's new collection of poetry, such questions are less a circulatory system--heart and lungs and blood--than a ribcage, a structure that protects the parts that matter most. "I'd like to think," Winger writes, "it doesn't matter / what we meant." But is that right? Could it ever be? Partly an investigation of system versus system error, It Doesn't Matter What We Meant asks us to own up to our own inherited contexts, our own luck or misfortune, our own ways of moving through each weekday. From meditations on sleepy wind turbines to Voyager 1's dormant thrusters, from Korean baseball stadiums to messy factory floors, from allied English-to-English folkloric translations to the crumbling limestone of misremembered basements, this is poetry that complicates what it means to live within and beyond the languages, lexicons, and locations around us.

In this eagerly anticipated follow-up to his award-winning, critically lauded debut, Rob Winger's sophomore collection, The Chimney Stone, bends the contemporary lyric into startling new shapes. Concentrating on a splendid mess of headlines, wars, politics, relationships and artistic influences, Winger's ghazals ask us how to negotiate the complex commitments and chaotic tumult of our daily lives. Making use of the ghazal's original address to both a secular lover and a sacred ethics, Winger's four sections move from examinations of gender in "Iron John" and "Bloody Mary", to an ironic investigation of common experience in "Idiot Wind", to a record of both human rights abuses and personal epiphany in "Blind Date". In the process, Winger not only engages in dialogue with other poets -- John Thompson, Phyllis Webb, Adrienne Rich, Ghalib and more -- but also welcomes other voices, measures, and musical phrases into his couplets. Here, Rimbaud rubs shoulders with Joe Strummer and David Byrne; Dylan exchanges one-liners with Gaston Bachelard; Johnny Cash spars with the Fisk Jubilee Singers; and Gretzky makes a pass to a smooth right winger. Drifting from razor-carved sternums, to Lhasa runways, to Southeast Asian temples and beaches, to eighteenth-century shipwrecks, bloody tanks, rusty apartheid, blind genocide and burning teddy bears, the book urges us to re-examine not only how we order the contemporary world, but also how we become its citizens or revolutionaries, grandparents or kids, protestors or politicians. Ethically charged, tenderly observed, and masterfully realised, Winger's poems are a vital addition to the ghazal's continued evolution.