American Incident

 

 

American Incident appeared in December 2002 from Salt Publishing, an independent publisher with offices in Cambridge, England and Perth, Australia. American Incident is a 172-page collection of prose and poetry, including a scattered novella, a performance text, lyric poems, anti-lyrics, short fictions, prose poems and their deformed counterparts, verse essays, parodies, and fragments.

"This capacious third volume from a much-remarked young poet-critic offers versatility, up-to-the-minute references, and edgy verbal fireworks framed by a remarkable range of forms. ... The volume represents an advance on Henry's previous poetry not only in its startling quantity, but also in its quality: it will match, and perhaps extend, his growing transatlantic reputation." --Publishers Weekly

"strange and compulsive" --Jules Smith, TLS

"Reading American Incident is an exciting, deeply unsettling experience. Few poets have Brian Henry's eye and ear for the gridlock of everyday life in America today, where "A warning light is flashing on the dashboard: / we need tax relief now," and the suburban front porch turns out to be the setting for the "Patricide" series--paragraphs that use a whiplash effect to dramatize the intractibility of our daily problems. But Henry's satiric thrust is by no means condescending: his malice is directed at himself as well as everyone else. American Incident is brilliant, funny, reckless: one of the best books of poetry I've come across in a long time." --Marjorie Perloff

American Incident "showcases a distinctive American poet ... Erudite, at times playful, and often requiring several readings, these poems will delight readers who enjoy the work of Charles Olson and Robert Duncan." --Rochelle Ratner, Library Journal

"The real subject of American Incident is violence--familial, political, and especially sexual. The idea of violence, threats of violence, and acts of violence run through virtually all the selections here. ... If American Incident concerns itself with violence, then certainly language, sometimes violent itself, is another major concern--especially the way we represent violence in words. The pieces here are written in polyphonic voices from coarse to fine, often shifting registers in the same poem." --Joshua Harmon, West Branch