Poetry.
Paperback. Noemi Press (2015).
$15.00
This is part of Woodland Pattern's 2016 Local Author Reading Challenge. Learn more.
"A book of transformation, Roberto Harrison’s bicycle proposes the incredible two-wheeled velocipede as the newest vehicle of enlightenment. The lines of the verse are spokes, the stanzas the strokes of the thighs as they peddle through a recurrent but new teaching. At once subtle and earnest, bicycle is magically perceptive and gentle and wise. There is nothing else like it. Harrison is a master."
~Peter O’Leary
Composed of five movements, bicycle‘s predominant imaginings, that of circles and bridges, bond the worlds of the Americas through all their interior levels. In such marriage—where these interiors settle in silence and repose, where attachment and aversion are seen as different sides of one coin, where the wheels turn to resist and to empower the nameless, where refuge locations are made to allow the liminal to resolve itself and transcend—bicycle‘s America unleashes frame-breaking force to bare these uncharted worlds within our supposed divided countries and continents. Harrison’s poetic opens spaces where all dichotomies come together as an boundaryless egg of being; here, without and beyond language, the poetry of bicycle agitates and argues what is most real be witnessed in completion as a shapely gourd throbbing with prayers for both these unities and these differences, for the reception and the flowing through of a Being refusing to be stilled.
About the Author
Roberto Harrison is the author of the poetry collections Os (subpress, 2006), Counter Daemons (Litmus Press, 2006), bicycle (Noemi Press, 2015), culebra (Green Lantern Press, forthcoming 2015), Bridge of the World (Litmus Press, forthcoming 2017), as well as of many poetry chapbooks. With Andrew Levy he edited Crayon magazine from 1997 to 2008. He edits the Bronze Skull Press chapbook series and is also a visual artist. Check out more of Roberto Harrison's poetry on the Woodland Pattern blog.