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Holy Land (2008)

by Rauan Klassnik(Favorite Author)

4.55 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0977770966 (ISBN13: 9780977770960)

languge

English

genre

Poetry

publisher

Black Ocean

review 1: Rauan Klassnik's prose poems in Holy Land are a treat--each one a surreal journey of its own. I'll paste one of my favorites here:I’m on a cloud floating by and I’ve gone mad but madness flows away in a tall shining work of Art and I’m standing in front of a fountain and the world’s ringing down through me and there are no fields of migrants mixing hair and bone into concrete. Trucks lined up and ready. Cups of cold coffee, a Rolex and a crucifix. A girl on a payphone begging.---Sometimes, I'll admit, I don't "get" surrealist poetry, or I feel the writer doesn't, either. That he or she is just tricking us by stringing words together, but Rauan's the real deal. I was awed by his collection.I'm so thrilled that I have the chance to invite him "guest teach" my creati... moreve writing class October 29th. Yay, students! You're in for a treat!
review 2: I'll round up, to 5 full stars, from a 4.5 star rating. This review is a response I made to another reader's comments: Klassnik's work is nothing if not orginal, and as a fan of his orignality, I'm actually very pleased with Chantel's review, especially where she writes that "the poems make me think of dreams, bad dreams, the weird, dark, disturbing bad dreams I start having in summer when my bedroom gets too hot at night." That Klassnik's poems discomfit her in the same way as "heat induced bad dreams" provides some indication of the fierce, subterranean power of Klassnik's work. In a time of overall blandness, marked by an undifferentiation of voice and vision, Klassnik's work strikes me as arriving on the contemporary poetry stage with the elan of a Ralph Steadman album cover. But don't let that analogy fool you: He's deceptively tender, too. Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and even Lorca, when he was writing his gravest, most surreal poems, are other poets that come immediately to mind when drawing comparisions to the discomfiting power of Klassnik's work. Klassnik is fun to read for the same reason that Dr. Hunter S. Thompson felt that Ralph Steadman was fun to work with: "He has a really fine, raw sense of horror. By way of exaggeration and selective grotesquery. His view of reality is not entirely normal. Ralph sees through the glass very darkly." Besides this, Klassnik's raw, spare, hypnotic style may help reinvigorate the currently overcooked genre of the prose poem, helping rescue it from its more typical treatment as a repository for witty repartee. less

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