John High

“Zen student, NEA grant recipient, Fulbright Fellow, trail-blazing genre-bender and accomplished poet and translator John High here reveals his Bloodlines: Selected Writings. Drawing on four books, High includes the critically acclaimed novel-cum-serial prose poem The Desire Notebooks, which resembles Anne Carson's novel in verse Autobiography of Red in its fragmented narrative and compression of mythic allusions and aesthetics with daily contemporary life. High moves from straight, sober syntaxes and slow lyric rhythms for his more narrative work, to a tumbling form that relies less on conventional punctuation to make sense and more on sound, restrained urgency, a sad playfulness and a rush of images and observations: ‘finney intermittently swept up in this boat. the cargo carries rot oranges, tangerines, gnawed walnuts. cliffs obliterated in a blue heat. black steamers in the northern lights & these naked boys swimming on the shore. absence in the plot causes them to think of themselves.”
--Publisher's Weekly




High is the author of eight books, including his award-winning (Village Voice Literary Supplement top 25 books of the year) trilogy of poetic novels, The Desire Notebooks, and his recently published novel, Talking God's Radio Show and book-length poem, HERE. He has received four Fulbrights, two NEAs, and writing awards from the Witter Bynner Foundation, Arts International, and the Academy of American Poets, among others. A translator of several books of contemporary Russian poetry, he was the chief editor for Crossing Centuries: The New Russian Poetry. He is also the founding and former editor of the Five Fingers Review. He has taught Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, Moscow State University, Montclair University, and currently teaches Creative Writing and literature at Long Island University. He lives in Brooklyn with his daughter.

"John High is consummately an artist and a visionary. Through his barbeque-smoked voice, the dead and the lost, the innocent and the doomed speak to us with an urgency we cannot forget. He writes as if his being were at stake, as if our being were at stake. Like St. Dominic in Fra Angelico's fresco, with all the world's 'blueslime, pestilence mosquitoes, rain' swirling around him, John High concentrates, in his own words, with the 'clarity of the sun beating down.' Bloodline maps a poetic line that shoots from the American South to Moscow, from Zen aphorism to jazz-inspired improvisation, from suffering and redemption to suffering and redemption."