The Crows Were Laughing in Their Trees - Softcover

Conners, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1935210203 ISBN 13: 9781935210207

Publisher: White Pine Press, 2011

Synopsis

"Conners' prose poem is not just a beautiful quirky moment that gives us a glimpse of the miraculous, but also an attempt to become a myth in itself. That Conners seems to get it all into one book is simply amazing. What can I say? A literary master."--Ilya Kaminsky

"Conners writes with the playfulness and kinetic energy of an action painter. His spatters of images and fragmented narratives assume the condition of an exuberant non-sense that, in changing perspective, asserts a logic of its own."--Stuart Dybek

About this title

About the Author:

Peter Conners is a writer, poet, editor and publisher. His nonfiction books include Cornell '77: The Music, the Myth, and the Magnificence of the Grateful Dead's Concert at Barton Hall (Cornell University Press, 2016), JAMerica: The History of the Jam Band and Festival Scene (Da Capo Press, 2013), Growing Up Dead: The Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead (Da Capo Press, 2009), White Hand Society: The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg (City Lights Books, 2010). His poetry and fiction books include The Crows Were Laughing in their Trees (White Pine Press, 2011), Of Whiskey and Winter (White Pine Press, 2007), and Emily Ate the Wind (Marick Press, 2008). He also edited the groundbreaking anthology of prose poetry and flash fiction, PP/FF: An Anthology (Starcherone Books, 2006). In addition to his writing, he works as Publisher of BOA Editions, Ltd.

From Publishers Weekly:

Starred Review. Fractured fairy tales, intellectual animals ("spider monkeys of tiny rebellion"), Kafka-derived anti-parables, and bracingly fast run-on sentences—somewhere between a mystical incantation and a nervous breakdown—come thick and fast in Conners's powerful new book of prose poems. In one tale of archetypes behaving badly, "Father delivers the woman's enemy to her doorstep while Mother makes a list of betrayals while Sister's mind is populated by the ghosts of wallflowers." Elsewhere, Conners offers a sweet love story, a set of rants, a handful of paragraphs that evoke archeology as well as political change and "repeating patterns sunk into the concave surface of the rock of the Mesoamerican Poets of the Zapotec of the Maya in Veracruz in my backyard." Conners (most recently author of The White Hand Society, a study of the friendship between Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg) presents no view of the cosmos nor a consistent outlook in these robust sentences—more like a set of lenses or takes on a dangerous, passion-soaked world, a world that will surely stick in the mind. Prose poems, very short fiction, hard-to-classify compact meditations are enjoying some time in the sun now, and Conners's new pages approach the best in the lot. (Apr.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: White Pine Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1935210203
• ISBN 13: 9781935210207
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 96