Breakers

“In his first 10 books, Violi’s alchemical dream to change jokey comedy into pure poetry has placed him among Charles North, Tony Towle and Bill Zavatsky in the Shaggy Dog Studies department of the New York School. As with those poets at their lyric best, the poet presented in these seven long poems and series eschews puns, in-jokes, and cliches in favor of a reasonable romanticism amidst the mud and debris of an everyday life barely restraining its absurdity. ‘You can sigh like a distance,’ he writes in ‘Sputter and Blaze,’ a love poem set in a propeller factory, later admonishing, ‘night-soft flutter close your eyes / saying not yes not no not maybe.’ ‘Triptych,’ a poem in the form of TV program listings, is a chance for a beautiful haiku sneak attack, and ‘Harmatan,’ an early diaristic work melding life in New York City and along the Hudson with Peace Corps work in Nigeria, sustains its exuberance across 49 remarkable anecdotes. . . . In all, though, Violi’s a humane vision of laughter, and Breakers is a breakthrough collection.”

—Publishers Weekly

Publication date: June 1, 2000

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 6 x 9

Page count: 128 pages

ISBN: 9781566890991

Paul Randolph Violi (1944 - 2011) was an American poet born in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of eleven books of poetry, including Splurge, Fracas, The Curious Builder, Likewise, and most recently Overnight. He also worked as managing editor of Architectural Forum, organized poetry readings at the Museum of Modern Art. Awarded two poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Violi also received The John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award in Poetry, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Morton Dauwen Zabel Award, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award (1999), and awards from The Fund for Poetry, The New York Foundation for the Arts, The Ingram Merrill Foundation, and New York Creative Artists Public Service Fund

“One tour-de-force after another, each with an impressive sureness of touch. . . . No poet writing today has a greater breadth of sensibility than Violi, or expresses it in a greater range of styles, or uses more of the devices that poetry has to offer. His poems inspire the feelings of excitement about life that is, still, the ultimate function of art.”

—Tony Towle