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I Am Not What I Once Was: J. A. Tyler’s A Man of Glass and All the Ways We Have Failed

By David Blomenberg, Sycamore Review Contributor

J. A. Tyler has quite an astonishing number of works out recently, including INCONCEIVABLE WILSON, which was recently excerpted in PANK magazine, In Love with a Ghost, and, among other works, two chapbooks, and has no fewer than three books due out this year. What I’ve read of Wilson’s work focuses on the fragility of self, its parts, its dismantling. His most recent book A Man of Glass & The Ways We Have Failed shares this theme. “I remain, remainders,” the speaker in INCONCEIVABLE WILSON says, “the parts, pieces. I am dismantled. Tools and instruments and me taken apart.”

Even the genre Tyler writes in—he terms his longer works novel(la)s—dovetails with that sense of fractured identity. A Man of Glass… centers on one character’s point of view like a novella. It has stanzas instead of paragraphs, …MORE

Alice Notley’s Ghouls: Reclaiming Myth

by David Blomenberg, Sycamore Review Contributor

My strange reading coincidences continue. Wayne Miller’s wonderful poetry collection The City, Our City (a review of which appears in our most recent print issue) was part of an uncanny string of books I was reading that had to do with the formation and destruction of cities. The very next two books I picked up after writing that review continued the trend. It was a bit spooky, to be honest.

With a title like Songs and Stories of the Ghouls, it might at first blush appear as if the release date (at the beginning of November) of Alice Notley’s latest book might be part of a Halloween-themed publicity campaign. But considering that few poetry books get a publicity campaign of any sort, and in spite of ghouls and blood-sacs (more on that anon) and scattered …MORE

I Am Not What I Once Was: J. A. Tyler’s A Man of Glass and All the Ways We Have Failed

Alice Notley’s Ghouls: Reclaiming Myth

THE 2012 WABASH PRIZE FOR FICTION

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