The Notebook of False Purgatories

Poetry. "Standard Schaefer's work has consistently been little short of extraordinary. But now in this his fourth book, in the tradition of politically committed visionaries (almost as if he were a mix of Gerard de Nerval and Hannah Weiner), he calls us toward a 'humbler arrangement' of art and love, insisting in this set of triumphant and authentic aphorisms that nothing of or in this world is a fiasco, that if we mistake distraction for enchantment and fail to listen to the static of war, the lack of love, the codes of poetics and politics (which are one), we fail the real. Wonderment is an ethical discipline. Noons are all around us. I have never seen a poet do this to such an extraordinary degree. This is one of the few books that will remain, or so I would hope."--Gabriel Gudding"While it is true that THE NOTEBOOK OF FALSE PURGATORIES is a well wrought example of the dystopian sublime, the work is not only an instance of this vexed but seductive genre. Alternately, it might be a sublime version of melancholy realism or atonal pastoral. A quality of elegy and an unredeemed urge to allegory characterize the poems. The lines define: 'Thus nature is the paraphernalia of time.' They intimate a complex tale of states of being among people and things. 'Covered in spores and technicalities,' this notebook indulges in and provides the meditative pleasure that one has in reading notebooks. The language is imaginative and revelatory. There are surprises '... more private than an angel cutting her skull out.' There is science and there are politics. 'four for metaphor and four against' Surreality, climax and catastrophe obtain. 'The only clarity anyone could stand.' Here, for the taking.--Laura Moriarty