Ampersand Revisited - Paperback

by Simeon Berry (Author)

Berry's Ampersand Revisted is a lurid, lyrical trio of open prose poems marking up the blueprint of familial myth-making.

Front Jacket

Ampersand Revisited is an inverted Odyssey, etched in searing--downright entomological--precision.

"Ampersand Revisited tracks a father's retreat from occult ways of knowing through the wounded meshwork of the son's very grammar: it is a kind of Odyssey, inverted. Magical powers--ancient craftiness--might make the epic hero, but they are an impossible burden to live with in the Manichean, and very American, riddle that forges Ampersand's poeisis. Crossed & re-crossed with sex & suicide, school & mystery school, Ampersand Revisited riddles the drama not so much of the father's departure, but of his return. It is the vivid, laconic gloss of the ravages of mystical knowing. The son seeks the father through literature and sex while the mother does her Penelope work--her oblivion and recollection--by taking up with her coke-dealing suitor. And somehow a boy becomes a man. Ampersand Revisited does not speak through a Homeric mouth, but instead, through the Mallarmean page: everything in it is marked, marled by textuality: "the vague, diacritical marks of used condoms," "half-finished light like the burned church of an idea," "the spent hexagram of cigarettes & withered latex," or here, why not enjoy a sentence in its entirety: "The low afternoon light solders the sliding glass door into a stab of gold circuitry you step through, wincing, as you encounter the aphasic grammar of the falling snow."

Either language is the error out of which we proceed or the "warped platelet" through which Totality is given to us, and according to which we chart and gloss the intricate incommensurables that either corrupt or enlighten--but I should not say or. I should say & "Perhaps the reason why I've loved the direct address all these years / is because you can / talk to the beloved & the reader / without each one really knowing / about the other."

Ampersand Revisited is a haunting, an original achievement: in its tenderness; in its exhausted, even sore limpidity, I find more & more surprises, more gifts. I have read it again & again.

--Ariana Reines

Back Jacket

Ampersand Revisited is an inverted Odyssey, etched in searing--downright entomological--precision.

Ampersand Revisited tracks a father's retreat from occult ways of knowing through the wounded meshwork of the son's very grammar: it is a kind of Odyssey, inverted. Magical powers--ancient craftiness--might make the epic hero, but they are an impossible burden to live with in the Manichean, and very American, riddle that forges Ampersand's poeisis. Crossed & re-crossed with sex & suicide, school & mystery school, Ampersand Revisited riddles the drama not so much of the father's departure, but of his return. It is the vivid, laconic gloss of the ravages of mystical knowing. The son seeks the father through literature and sex while the mother does her Penelope work--her oblivion and recollection--by taking up with her coke-dealing suitor. And somehow a boy becomes a man. Ampersand Revisited does not speak through a Homeric mouth, but instead, through the Mallarmean page: everything in it is marked, marled by textuality: "the vague, diacritical marks of used condoms," "half-finished light like the burned church of an idea," "the spent hexagram of cigarettes & withered latex," or here, why not enjoy a sentence in its entirety: "The low afternoon light solders the sliding glass door into a stab of gold circuitry you step through, wincing, as you encounter the aphasic grammar of the falling snow."

Either language is the error out of which we proceed or the "warped platelet" through which Totality is given to us, and according to which we chart and gloss the intricate incommensurables that either corrupt or enlighten--but I should not say or. I should say &: "Perhaps the reason why I've loved the direct address all these years / is because you can / talk to the beloved & the reader / without each one really knowing / about the other."

Ampersand Revisited is a haunting, an original achievement: in its tenderness; in its exhausted, even sore limpidity, I find more & more surprises, more gifts. I have read it again & again.

--Ariana Reines

Author Biography

Simeon Berry has been an Associate Editor for Ploughshares, and won a Massachusetts Cultural Council Individual Artist Grant and a Career Chapter Award from the National Society of Arts and Letters. His work has appeared in Crazyhorse, AGNI, Colorado Review, Blackbird, DIAGRAM, The Iowa Review, American Letters & Commentary, and many other journals. His second book, Monograph, won the 2014 National Poetry Series (University of Georgia Press). He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.