In The Blue Hill, winner of the 2017 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize, sometimes time is the subject, and sometimes materiality, as these poems point us toward the strangeness at the heart of being. We are swept away, almost in spite of ourselves, by the hypnotic precision of language. It veers through twists and turns of utterly simple phrases into its own incandescent music.
In a Mist is Geoffrey O'Brien's seventh collection of poems. It brings together scenes recovered from dream or experience, transmuted fragments of myth, passages retrieved from lost libraries and recollected conversations, the story lines of imaginary films, snapshots of lake and street corner and darkened construction site, the inventions of sleeplessness, transcriptions of chime tones and birdsong, and the memory of faces.
From one of the most original writers now at work, an expansive, learned, and utterly charming reverie on what it means to be lost in a book.
In The Browser's Ecstasy , O'Brien has written a prose poem about reading, a playful, epigrammatic nocturne upon the dream-state one falls into when "lost in a book," upon the uncanny, trancelike pleasure of making silent marks on paper utter sounds inside one's head. We call The Browser's Ecstasy a "Meditation on Reading," but like any truly original book—and especially the short book that goes both far and deep—it resists easy summary and classification. As Luc Sante once wrote, "The density of O'Brien's work makes word count irrelevant as an index of substance; he is seemingly capable of compressing entire encyclopedias into his parenthetical asides. I defy you to name any precedent for what he does. He's a school unto himself."
Castaways of the Image Planet collects sixteen years' worth of Geoffrey O'Brien's essays on film and popular culture, most originally published in The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Film Comment, Filmmaker, and The New York Times.
The topics range from the invention of cinema to contemporary F-X aesthetics; from Shakespeare films to "Seinfeld"; from '30's screwball comedies to Hong Kong martial-arts movies; from the roots of sexploitation pictures to the televising of Bill Clinton's grand jury testimony. There is an emphasis on the unpredictable interactions between film as a medium apt for expressing the most private dreams and film as the mass literature of the modern world, subject to all the pressures of financing and marketing. Many of the pieces are profiles of individual directors or actors—Orson Welles, Michael Powell, Ed Wood, Marlon Brando, Alfred Hitchcock, Dana Andrews, The Marx Brothers, Bing Crosby—whose careers are probed to look for the point where private obsession meets public myth-making.
Sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll: the exhilarating but deranging American 1960's, captured in a classic. Dazzling, innovative, and courageous, Dream Time plunges the reader deep into the sensibility of the '60's in a wonderful display of cultural archaeology. Far from being an unqualified celebration of the era, it is a deliberate experiment, combining the genres of memoir, novel, and cultural history in order to convey the complex impact of the late '60's counterculture.When Dream Time was published in 1988, it won Geoffrey O'Brien a Whiting Writers' Award. Previous books on the subject had focused primarily on media icons such as Bob Dylan, John Lennon, or Andy Warhol; Dream Time shifts the focus to the ways in which the psychedelic and countercultural currents of the era played themselves out in younger and more marginal lives. If you lived it, but never really came to grips with it; if you missed it but wish you hadn't—this is the book that tells it, at last, like it really was.
"The precision and ordered intelligence of Geoffrey O'Brien's essays are turned inside out in the dream landscapes of his poetry. The result is a kind of spectral tapestry where words and images are stripped to their own inherent valence and deeper codings the better to hunt down resemblances and resolutions. The effects are mysterious, hypnotic, often breathtaking, and, I think, unique in American poetry." —August Kleinzahler
Dashiell Hammett, Mickey Spillane, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson, David Goodis . . . these are a few of the masters of noir responsible for the great lurid paperbacks of the thirties, forties, and fifties. With titles like The Big Sleep, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, and Street of the Lost, with racy cover lines like "My gun-butt smashed his skull!" and "Ruthless terror ripped away the mask that hid cold fear," and with some of the most extraordinary cover illustrations ever to grace American literature, these paperbacks held the ingredients of American nightmares. In Harboiled America—lavishly illustrated with 135 paperback covers, and expanded with new material on Thompson, Goodis, and others—Geoffrey O'Brien masterfully explores the art, history, and ideas of the American paperback.
Red Sky Café contains postcards and poem-cards, a fistful of sonnets, a cento and a lipogram, a Greek myth retold by its regretful hero, a dance number from a lost Betty Grable musical. It mixes songs, narrative episodes, previews of coming attractions, and television programs glimpsed through the window of a neighbor's apartment.
Dazzling and original, Sonata for Jukebox is a brilliant foray into how pop music has woven itself into our lives since the dawn of the recording age. Geoffrey O'Brien delves into twentieth-century pop music as we experience it: a phenomenon that is at once public and private, personal yet popular. O'Brien's book is more than a history of pop music, although fragments of that history find their way into its pages. And it reaches far beyond a memoir, although it is an entertaining biography of the author's ears and his family's exceptional affinity with pop music—his father was a leading New York DJ and his grandfather led a dance band in Philadelphia. Ultimately, it is an exploration of what we as listeners hear, what we think we hear, and how we connect that experience with the rest of our lives. The dizzying array of musical references plays like a sound-track as O'Brien explores how our lives are lived in the presence—and in the memory of the presence—of music.
