Critical praise for The Removes

Andrew Joron explores the dominion of thought. The Removes is guided by language that multiplies the meaning of thought. The poetry develops in several dimensions and echoes of Poe add to its mystery. In creating his exceptional book, Joron reminds us that the boldness of Poetry, and this book has a bold forecasting, maintains itself by levelling "the New" on remainders of "the Past."

The Removes is a book of American hieroglyphs, a haunting tracery of "broken branching signals / Faultless as some harp-tuning." Poe assumes a proper totemic role (along with such companions as H. P. Lovecraft and Wallace Stevens) in these poems pitched consistently at a Eureka-like level of ecstatic speculation. Andrew Joron is master of a gaudy and tremulous abstraction, capable of harboring rust or blood among its numbers: an abstraction ultimately not abstract at all since "The bodiless / Enters through the ears and nostrils." He hears the wind from interstellar space howling through the nets of language, and transcribes it as an intricate and multilayered music.

The who, what and where of Andrew Joron

Andrew Joron lives in Berkeley, California, where he works as a freelance proofreader and library assistant. He grew up in Germany, Massachusetts, and Montana, and attended the University of California at Berkeley (majoring in the history of science). He has translated the German philosopher Ernst Bloch's Literary Essays (Stanford University Press). This is his first solo book publication.

Previous publications

Andrew Joron has published his individual poems in many places including:

Magazines: apex of the M, Caliban, Central Park, First Intensity , Five Fingers Review , The Germ , Hambone , lingo , Mirage #4/Period[ical] , New American Writing , Notus , o.blek , Orpheus Grid , Prosodia , Sulfur , Talisman, and ZYZZYVA .

Anthologies: The Poets' Calendar, edited by Douglas Messerli (Sun and Moon, 1997); The Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative American Poetry 1994-1995, edited by Douglas Messerli (Sun and Moon, 1996); Primary Trouble: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, edited by Leonard Schwartz, Joseph Donahue, and Edward Foster (Talisman House, 1996).