For Crying Out Loud

Jonathan Greene

Mountains & Rivers Press c2003

For 500 years teachers and scholars have commended the practice of recording "commonplaces" -  that is, striking and noteworthy phrases encountered while reading - for later reference.  Few in recent times have taken this advice with such good effect as Jonathan Greene.  A poet, publisher, book designer and translator, Greene is foremost a reader of vast range and expansive curiosity.  The fruits of over forty years of reading with pen in hand are collected here for the enlightenment and delight of his fellow readers.  Ancient Chinese sages mingle with modern jazz masters, Yogi Berra meets Einstein, and the wisdom (and wit) of great minds known and unknown is on parade. In the end, this collection of such seemingly disparate thinkers and themes coalesces into an original work in its own right, an intellectual and artistic portrait of Greene himself, offering new and deeper insights into the mind and heart behind his many volumes of poetry.

Gists, Orts, Shards: A Commonplace Book

Literature & Fiction

Broadstone Books

In this new collection of his poetry written since 2004, Greene does indeed explore those matters closest to his heart, both the personal and, increasingly, the social and political. Ranging over subjects light and profound, at times amused and at others outraged, he is everywhere intensely alive to the experience of life itself, and all the reasons, as he says at one point, to love this world. In verse that is spare but never sparse, he opens our hearts along with his own.

Heart Matters

As Robert Richardson Jr. said of Thoreau, quoting what Augustine is reported to have remarked of Varro (one of the many delightful discoveries awaiting in this new volume), we can truly say of Jonathan Greene that he read so much that it was a marvel he ever had time to write anything, and wrote so much that it was difficult to see how he found time to read. Except with Greene we must add his prolific output as a designer and publisher of books as well! We can all be grateful once more for Greene's broad and perceptive reading, for this companion volume to his Gists, Orts, Shards: A Commonplace Book offers another installment of essential thought and marvelous wit distilled from the world's literature, joined here with excepts from Greene's own literary notebooks. Readers of the original volume know the treat they have in store, while those discovering Greene's gift for "reading with a pen" for the first time are apt to find that they see literature, and life, in a new way after this introduction.    "A commonplace book is a collection of remarkable quotations. To deserve publication, such a book should be more than an abbreviation of its compiler's reading history: through selection and arrangment, it should set up impossible conversations, exchanges between great minds who never met. It should lay out agreements and disagreements, similar conclusions reached in different circumstances - or vice versa. The connections, like spiderwebs, may be obvious or nearly invisible.    Greene's book is testimony to a mind ripened by a lifetime of reading - but it's also a fascinating (and sometimes startling) symposium open to all."    Robert West

Gists, Orts, Shards II: Addendum & Postludes for A Commonplace Book

Reference

Quotations

Kill Switch (Library Edition)

Neal Baer

United States

Blackstone Audio,Inc.

Kill Switch

Blackstone Audiobooks

Dr. Claire Waters is haunted by her violent past, but she's determined to return her life to normalcy. One of her patients, Rosa Sanchez, has given Claire hope for a brighter future -- but then Rosa goes missing, and Claire suspects the worst. Claire enlists the help of Nick Lawler, an NYPD detective but who has been relegated to desk duty because of his failing eyesight. Waters and Lawler must unite to stop the killer who boils his victims, leaving only a pile of bones behind and a word puzzle to solve. Claire and Nick track down a killer who is hell-bent on reviving David Berkowitz's reign of terror in Manhattan.

Kill Again (Claire Waters Series, Book 2)

Short poem, be brief and tell us everything Charles Simic  This volume demonstrates the power of the short poem to fulfill Simic's charge extraordinarily well. For over a dozen years editors Greene and West have poured over the best short verse (defined here as less than sonnet length) from around the world and over the centuries, with their results compiled here. Over 150 poets are represented, each by one poem, and their appearance in alphabetical order by author makes for startling and illuminating juxtapositions.  In an era of tweets and sound bites, the short poem may be the perfect literary form to capture our attention, for what great poets - like the ones collected here - have always known is that the short poem is the perfect vehicle to convey the maximum amount of content with the greatest economy of language; to be, in a word, succinct. Yet however counterintuitively, the short poem is also an antidote to acceleration. It often requires - indeed, demands - that we slow down to let each word speak to us. The short poem intrigues and invites us read and re-read, giving up its meaning gradually.  The poems collected here come from across centuries and from many languages and cultures, but all share the power to stop us in our tracks, at least for a moment, and to "tell us everything." Whether philosophical or poignant, aggrieved or whimsical, bucolic or boisterous, each creates a little space containing a great wide world.

Succinct: The Broadstone Anthology of Short Poems

Robert West

In celebration of the poet Jonathan Greene turning 70, this volume gathers verse from the preceding fifteen years of his writing and includes poems never before published or previously appearing only in very limited editions.  "...his concerns - nature, mortality, love, politics, art, memory, loss - are large, and the cumulative effect is what only the best art can give us, our very existence altered, enriched" Ron Rash  "Jonathan Greene is the real thing. The reader is in for an extraordinary symphony of pleasure and insight." Julia Alvarez  "These finely distilled poems show us the way without getting in the way - worth holding on to for a long, long time!" John Brandi

Seeking Light: New & Selected Later Poems

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Books by Jonathan Greene