Can It!
by Edmund Berrigan
About Can It!
A memoir and other texts. March 2013. Order from Small Press Distribution here.
Excerpt from Can It!
In the foreword to his book Can It!, Edmund Berrigan explains that he’s “been looking to make a book… that works as both a whole and as parts, that might be visited from any point like a memory, that doesn’t rely on classification for definition… that tells a whole story by showing a fragmented record.” A kind of Surrealist variety show—both outrageous and contemplative—that, at its core, houses a powerful engine of coincidence, Can It! collects, recollects, experiments, and entertains. No matter the mode, the poetic line here runs true, and never misses a chance to speak back to its reader: “I’m not satisfied and neither are we. What of the filth of experimentation, the thrill of the rivet? What about satisfying the need to be imagination’s lip?” Consider Can It! a compilation of messages from the past. Or a poet’s handbook. Or a dreamscape. All of the above would be correct, and of course, fall shy of the grandeur that comprises this labyrinth of a book.
About the Author
Edmund Berrigan is the author of two full-length books of poetry,
Disarming Matter (Owl Press, 1999) and Glad Stone Children (Farfalla, 2008), as well as several short collections. He is editor of the Selected Poems of Steve Carey (Sub Press, 2009), and is co-editor with Anselm Berrigan and Alice Notley of the Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (University of California, 2005) and the Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan (University of California, 2010). He is an editor of Vlak magazine and on the editorial board of Lungfull!, has twice received grants from the Fund for Poetry, and was named a NYFA Fellow in poetry in 2009.