Featured Title: Sleeping and Waking
Sleeping and Waking
by Michael O'Brien
In celebration of National Poetry Month, check out this book of poetry from a former librarian, Michael O'Brien, who was part of the Eventorium poets (group of artists from NYC who were interested in surrealism).
Review highlight from The New York Times (Dec. 9, 2007):
“Sleeping and Waking” is a quietly startling collection that ought to earn O’Brien not only poetry-world attention, but actual readers. They’ll need to be attentive, though. O’Brien is primarily an observer rather than a debater, and the poems here are heavy on isolated images, dream logic, bits of overheard conversation (typically urban conversation) and memories, with larger themes emerging through juxtapositions and repetitions. Indeed, many poems consist of nothing but juxtapositions and repetitions. “Another Autumn,” for instance, is a series of one-line sketches — “a feathering of the ink whereby characters lose definition” is followed by “overlapping windowscreens, one pattern interfering with another,” which is in turn followed by “sideways, all the politeness, all that irony, trying for a draw” (an echo of a line from “A Pillow-Book,” a much earlier O’Brien poem). Reading the best work here is like watching watercolors blur across wet paper, gradually mingling to produce soft yet definite shapes. It’s writing more interesting to sink into than to parse."
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