"With alarmed intelligence, FOLDING RULER STAR exposes the violence of an expectant look, synthesizes the organic and robotic then unzips them just as machines unzip / concrete dividers / on the highway. May Aaron Kunin make all the rules, and may our capacity for facial communication finally collapse within his tremendous Dionysian orderliness."--Jacqueline Waters

Folding Ruler Star

Literature & Fiction

Kunin, Aaron

United States

Fence Books

Literary Nonfiction. According to Frances Burney, "Awkwardness is, perhaps, more interesting than grace." Forfeiting the opportunity to be graceful, GRACE PERIOD: NOTEBOOKS, 1998-2007 would like to be something more interesting.Full of curious knowledge, the book collects aphorisms, sketches, and fragments from ten years of life. Notes on various subjects, written hastily, using the first words that suggested themselves. Diagrams of relationships, denuded of situation, and infused with richness and depth of feeling and mental tentacle. Portraits of unidentified people by way of their handwriting, characteristic thought patterns, and tones of voice. Definitions of colloquial expressions, what they mean and how they are used. Detailed descriptions of people eating, with enough tea to float away on. Advice on love. Prayers, curses, dreams. Moral maxims. Occasional rhymes.The special beauty of incomplete form depends on unachieved potential: because they are imperfect, fragments suggest a variety of perfections. They retain traces of their original context, as well as the charm of having escaped it.Kunin's grace period started in 1998, when he moved to Baltimore; in 2007, he was in California, where he lives now. During that time, in these little notebooks, he was learning how to write.

Grace Period: Notebooks, 1998-2007

History & Criticism

Letter Machine Editions

Character as Form (Beyond Criticism)

What if the Renaissance had the right idea about character? Most readers today think that characters are individuals. Poets of the Renaissance understood characters as types. They thought the job of a character was to collect every example of a kind, in the same way that an entry in a dictionary collects definitions of a word. Character as Form celebrates the old meaning of character. The advantage of the old meaning is that it allows for generalization. Characters funnel whole societies of beings into shapes that are compact, elegant, and portable. This book tests the old meaning of character against modern examples from poems, novels, comics, and performances in theater and film by Shakespeare, Molière, Austen, the Marx Brothers, Raul Ruiz, Denton Welch, and Lynda Barry. The heart of the book is the character of the misanthrope, who, in Shakespeare's phrase, “banishes the world.”

Bloomsbury Academic

THE MANDARIN pretends to be an ordinary novel. But it is set in places that no longer exist. The plot develops recursively rather than progressively. It is written almost entirely in dialogue: consciousness tends to be communal rather than personal. At any moment, the characters might stop talking and start doing something. They won't, but the option is always available.

The Mandarin

Humor & Satire

"How about someone from another planet?"—Peter Gizzi
"This would make a great chorus for 'Nosferatu.'"—Marjorie Welish
"It's the real thing."—Keith Waldrop
Combining formal procedure with a kind of automatic writing, The Sore Throat produces poems of unlikely, and heightened, sensitivity to nuances of feeling.

The Sore Throat & Other Poems

The United Fruit Company during the Cold War; two myths about the discovery of laughter. Tender love lyrics in a domestic setting; vows of love are exchanged. An extended verse essay on tickling. Like Antonin Scalia, this book believes in the devil. The human soul figures.
History is the soft medium into which you cut; love "is the" instrument that cuts. "Love is the" drill. "Love" "cuts" to "the" depth of "the" jokes, "which" flow out. Puns "flow out" gaily from "the" wound made by "love."
Aaron Kunin is author of two previous collections, and a professor at Pomona College.

Cold Genius

Love Three is a study of a seventeenth-century devotional poem by George Herbert; an essay on eroticizing power; and a memory palace of sexual experiences, fantasies, preferences, and limits―with Herbert’s poem as the key. It is unlike anything you have ever read―a deep, attentive reading of a text and a broad analysis (personal, historical, philosophical) of humanity’s most enduring theme.

Love Three: A Study of a Poem by George Herbert

Wave Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kunin, Aaron. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Kunin, Aaron

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kunin, Aaron. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Folding Ruler Star

Grace Period: Notebooks, 1998-2007

Character as Form (Beyond Criticism)

Character as Form (Beyond Criticism)

The Mandarin

The Sore Throat & Other Poems

Cold Genius

Love Three: A Study of a Poem by George Herbert