{"product_id":"walsh-michael-joseph-innocence","title":"Walsh, Michael Joseph: Innocence","description":"\u003cp\u003eCleveland State University Poetry Center, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: October 4, 2022\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: Winner of the 2021 CSU Poetry Center Lighthouse Poetry Series Competition, selected by Shane McCrae.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn a well-known Zen koan, the bodhisattva Dizang says, Not knowing is most intimate. Michael Joseph Walsh's first collection of poetry, INNOCENCE--is about the unknowability of the future--the political, cultural, technological future--and the vertiginous intimacy of contemplating that future from within the digital panopticon. The poems in Innocence are interested in virality, late capitalism, apocalypse, and clouds--the clouds in the sky, the Cloud where our files live, and the Cloud of Unknowing. This stunning debut dwells in the innocence--that is, the guilelessness--with which we appear be destroying ourselves.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eComplete as first books of poetry rarely are, integral as first books of poetry rarely are, Innocence reads as if it exists only to be; it pursues no end other than its own being, which is the end of all successful works of art, whatever a particular work's subject. Innocence is 'that spoken thing \/ Only now created \/ That opens out into every room, ' which is to say, alive from beginning to end, a life.--Shane Mccrae\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis meditative, alternately lulling and troubling book takes place in the discrepancy between our imagined futures and the brutal, real present, or their uncanny overlap, 'a hybrid machine': 'some golden \/ coherence \/\/ which is the violent perception \/ of a mistake.' 'It is eerie to live.' INNOCENCE is intimate and distant, haunting and estranging, 'a dance of omission.'--Elisa Gabbert\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAt once almost authorless--like a great Bridget Riley painting or DJ Shadow's Endtroducing--and intensely intimate--Michael Walsh has some 'wild news' for you!--the poems in Innocence are responsible for some of the most rewarding reading experiences I've had as of late. There's a strange and rare sort of transport to them: 'Yet now I feel like dancing, ' says a speaker who also seems to feel like a motherless child. And though there's a lot to learn from Walsh's adroit lineation (which at times feels akin to William Hunt's in his terrific and vastly underappreciated\u003cem\u003e Of the Map That Changes\u003c\/em\u003e) I think I like crawling through the briars of the prose of 'Insider, ' with its many 'realizing grace[s], ' best. This is a first book of the first water.--Graham Foust\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40349382180887,"sku":"9781734816754","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/9781734816754.jpg?v=1665610772","url":"https:\/\/open-books-a-poem-emporium.myshopify.com\/products\/walsh-michael-joseph-innocence","provider":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","version":"1.0","type":"link"}