Böcker av George Quasha

Preverbs are not so much assertions as events. Read on the page or, better yet, spoken, each of Quasha''s lines is an occasion for becoming aware of meaning in the making. Releasing words from semantic routine, reinventing syntax on the fly, the preverbs provide us with endless opportunities to entangle ourselves in ambiguity and seeming contradiction. As they bring us to the verge of unintelligibility, entanglement becomes an embrace and we generate new powerful meanings- not once for all but in a succession of instants that carry us from line to line, page to page, precipitating us into an expansive, endlessly renewable present.

Poetry. SCORNED BEAUTY COMES UP FROM BEHIND: PREVERBS is one of seven "preverb complexes" comprising the unpublished book Exchanging Intentions, itself one of seven books of preverbs, of which the first to be published was Verbal Paradise (Zasterle: 2011). A preverb is like a proverb, a one-line capture of wisdom, but at the raw stage before wisdom. Such an open intentional act of language invites configurative reading as a singular event of variable meaning. An instance of axial poetics, it puts language on its own stepped-up recognizance. Robert Kelly writes, "SCORNED BEAUTY is the most gripping series of poems I've read in a long time. Wise, funny, humble, arrogant, lovesick, swooning into uncountable clarities. It seems the full maturation of work, of presence."