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books  "This book -- and it really is a Book --walks the paradoxical intersection back and forth -- between substance and spirit -- with restless, spare steps. Fleeting images of the monastic life -- as an assurance and a dream -- can't quite dissolve the secular disappointments and losses behind each sentence. This way the book becomes for the reader what it is for the writer: a searing study of Here as an enfolded Everywhere." --Fanny Howe In Here John High has created a cinema of the page Tarkofsky himself might treasure. This book-length elegy for a brother is also a gathering of icons for the end of the world, a world of nostalgia and sacrifice and unremitting vision, the "normal grandeur of abandon," the poet might let slip, as his extraordinary scenes float before us. Blood, snow, branches, a one-eyed boy, questions for an empty sky, all flare in this film, this pilgrimage to a place, here, that seems, after all, as death sometimes does, to be traveling as well towards us. It would be too cruel to say this book is one John High was born to write. Let s just say: how lucky the dead man was, to have been so loved. --Joseph Donahue In this book-length elegy rendered in the sparest strokes, the silence of the dead meets a Zen stillness centered in the author s own practice. John High handles his subject with the most delicate distance -- we never fully see the brother he mourns, but we sense him always, getting larger and larger, as only the dead can do, until he has become indistinguishable from the world he left. In this lovely book, High turns elegy to discovery while retaining the truth of sadness, and matches brevity with a generosity that not only grasps, but also loves, the human condition. --Cole Swensen Talking God's Radio Show, a new novel, by John High
“Soaked in night visions and pierced through by jagged memory, Talking God's Radio Show tells that peculiarly American story in which, as Faulkner once said, ‘The past isn't forgotten, it isn't even the past.’ John High's Virginia backwaters call to mind the feral, hallucinogenic American landscapes of Cormac McCarthy's Child of God, as well as Faulkner's Sanctuary…” --Albert Mobilio "In High's Southern gothic, Jesse Rivers, half African-American and half white, looks back over a lifetime struggle that has put him in numerous psych wards, and tells about his crucial 15th year, in 1965, when his life seemed to crack open. After his mother dies, and his best friend, Charlie Monroe, is killed by the cops, Jesse and his retarded sister, Amy, end up in "Camp Jesus," run by "Mama" Evangeline. Jesse escapes after Amy commits suicide and "Mama" tries to make him an evangelical radio announcer. In the sleazy Shakhoe district of Richmond, Va., Jesse hooks up with a fellow Camp Jesus escapee, Tyrone Christopher, to form a dance team that performs at a strip joint owned by a transvestite mob boss. Lee, Tyrone's lover, lurks in the background: murder is in the air, as is betrayal.... High imparts a strong sense of the price Jesse pays for psychic survival." --Publisher's Weekly “The red-light district of Richmond, Virginia in the mid-sixties is the backdrop [of Talking God's Radio Show] and High is the ultimate time traveler-recreating the arcane of a world that seems long gone but is actually steeped in present day time. Talking God's Radio Show is airtight and explosive and belongs on the same shelf as James Ellroy's My Dark Places and Leslie Silko's Ceremony.” --Lewis Warsh The Desire Notebooks
"...High's expansive opus, The Desire Notebooks, pulsates with fullness and loss. It's always startling to find yourself close to someone whose vibrant voice responds to every nuance of the breathing world, whose sentient experience is so awake that you find yourself awakened. This work roves through rituals of experience and imagination, taking us there." --Frances Mayes Bloodline
"John High's poems...move me by their authenticity, their urgent and deep emotional content.... They had to be poems. Moving in and by image and intuition, they'd discover, as they go, the shapes and patterns by which thoughts, concepts, and states of feeling sing themselves forth." --Denise Levertov “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." --Publishers Weekly "John High ranks among the most accomplished and respected poets, translators, and editors of his generation. Founding editor of Five Fingers Review and author of The Lives of Thomas, The Sasha Poems, and The Desire Notebooks, among others, he is one of his generation's foremost translators of contemporary Russian poetry. The principal editor of Crossing Centuries: The New Generation in Russian Poetry, he is known for his translations of Nina Iskrenko, Ivan Zhdanoz, and Alexei Parschikov, among others. A former Fulbright professor at Moscow State University, he currently teaches at Long Island University." --from the Publisher Crossing Centuries:
The New Russian Poetry Crossing Centuries, including the work of approximately fifty translators and ninety poets, focuses on transformations in Russian poetry from the 1970s to the present with particular attention to the Brezhnev years and the profound changes in language and values that followed the collapse of the Soviet regime. |
booksFiction
Talking God's Radio Show, a new novel, by John High
“Soaked in night visions and pierced through by jagged memory, Talking God's Radio Show tells that peculiarly American story in which, as Faulkner once said, ‘The past isn't forgotten, it isn't even the past.’ John High's Virginia backwaters call to mind the feral, hallucinogenic American landscapes of Cormac McCarthy's Child of God, as well as Faulkner's Sanctuary…” --Albert Mobilio The Desire Notebooks
"[The Desire Notebooks is a] beautiful book; luminous, mysterious, hypnotic." --Carole Maso New Poetry
Here
"...High turns elegy to discovery while retaining the truth of sadness, and matches brevity with a generosity that not only grasps, but also loves, the human condition." --Cole Swensen Poetry Translation
Selected Poetry & Prose
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