Rodney Koeneke is author of the poetry collections Body & Glass (forthcoming, Wave Books, 2018), Etruria(Wave Books, 2014), Musee Mechanique (BlazeVOX, 2006), and Rouge State(Pavement Saw, 2003). An early member of the Flarf collective, he was active in the San Francisco Bay Area poetry scene until 2006, when he moved to Portland, Oregon where he teaches in the History Department at Portland State University.
"'A star arriving firmly / at the center of its cluster' is Rodney
Koeneke's Body & Glass. There is something very singing and also
staid about these poems. I mean they have both a freshness and the
mark of an experienced hand behind them. I hesitate to call it a
'maturity' because it has a jouissance I don't associate with that
word. These poems continue to yield fruit on multiple readings:
'furzed glebe' . . . 'prefer your lineaments / to any rotting /
thing this world adores.' They feel nutritious to me somehow,
nutrient-dense, coming out of great care, great grief, great toil
(for all their sprezzatura): 'antiphons' slurring / surmising the
psalm.'"
--Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Poetry Foundation
"Composed with an incredible, subtle sharpness, his is a poetics,
and even a politics, that embrace both optimism and
exhaustion."
--Rob McLennan's Blog
"I find in Rodney Koeneke's poetry a kind of reinscription of
history, but not in the manner of the New Formalists or any other
reactionary turning back to tradition. It's something more like the
cadence of a half-remembered song filtering back into the flow of
lived experience. Technologized and commodified as that experience
has become, our bodies and our language--the indispensable
conductors of that experience--are still liable to manifest
symptoms of a return of repressed history. In Koeneke's case, the
default irony of most recent avantgarde poetics--so necessary, it
seems, for coming to terms with the floatiness of our condition--is
undermined by the Undermind of an undead tradition whose
word-weights and word-motions still pull toward something rather
than nothing."
--Andrew Joron, Lana Turner
"Much of his book plays with notions of agency. There is a
particularly effective destabilizing shift between the third-person
mode of some of his poems' titles and the 'I' that then acts out
those titles . . . Koeneke's blend of pathos, erudition, and whimsy
results in an enjoyable collection that rewards repeated
engagement."
Publishers Weekly
"The naturalness of Koeneke's essayistic explorations and his adept
weaving of disparate sources make this an engaging, thoughtful, and
consistently surprising collection."--Publishers Weekly "How
refreshing; culturally grounded poems as if culture
mattered."--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal "Here is a
preternatural social sensibility that remains poignant even as it
confronts what today passes for the sentimental; here is an elegant
figural technique that never disappoints."--Judith Goldman, Drunken
Boat
"The poems in Body & Glass read as if they're dissolving in the
volatile solvent that is thinking, and though it's easy to be
carried away when Koeneke waxes with tools like assonance and
spontaneous rhyme--carried away to a place where recognition of the
poem's work can often be dusted out of vantage--it is just as
important to see the back and forth between body and glass, between
naming and name. The cumulative effect of reading many of Koeneke's
poems in one sitting feels like the mind being crocheted, portions
hidden away into lockets, others coded into nodes."
--Tyler Flynn Dorholt, 4squarereview
"What anybody can plainly hear and dig in this book is Koeneke's
great genius for form, his full and vivacious commitment to it. I
guess it's a pretty unfashionable approach nowadays, or maybe
that's an understatement: it feels almost illegal to write a
couplet like 'drops beat loose slates, / froth swells drain's loud
pans' in 2018. Such a flurry of spondees! (Spondeema? Spandau?) In
any case, even in that wee snippet you can maybe notice the way
these poems use sound and meter as a kind of enjoyable ground that,
in turn, allows the figure--say, bursts of the unexpectedly odd or
the unexpectedly heartfelt or the unexpectedly meaningful--to leap
out. With this book and Rodney's last one I'm starting to think of
him the way I used to think about Thom Gunn, out there running
contemporary concerns through traditional forms and baroque
vocabularies in order to arrive at some really tight, really
touching, and fabulously far out there stuff."
--Brent Cunningham, SPD Staff Picks
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