The Batteries

Waldrep, G.C.

New Michigan Press

Poetry. G.C. Waldrep, always a startlingly original, appealing poetic voice, uses music theory and history to explore the interweaving of language and music. In fiercely intelligent, passionate verse, the poet seeks the delicate point between the voice of a singer (music) and that of a poet (language). An archicembalo (pronounced ark-e-Chem-ball-o) was a complex sixteenth-century instrument, a successor to the harpsichord. The book is structured after a gamut, a nineteenth-century musical primer. Originally a single note on the scale, a gamut later came to mean a whole range-as in a singer or actor's ability to "cover the whole gamut."

ARCHICEMBALO

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Tupelo Press

In this book-length poem, G.C. Waldrep addresses matters as diverse as Mormonism, cymatics, race, Dolly the cloned sheep, and his own life and faith. Drafted over twelve trance-like days while in residence at Hawthornden Castle, Waldrep responds to such poets as Alice Notley, Lisa Robertson, and Carla Harryman, and tackles the question of whether gender can be a lyric form.
G.C. Waldrep's books include Disclamor (BOA Editions Ltd., 2007) and Your Father on the Train of Ghosts (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2011). He lives in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where he teaches at Bucknell University, edits West Branch, and serves as editor-at-large for the Kenyon Review.

Testament (American Poets Continuum)

Religion & Spirituality

BOA Editions, Ltd.

In his most autobiographically transparent (and most comical) collection to date, Waldrep explores the intersections between body and spirit, faith and action. These are lyrics of incarnation, of method and meat-hood, of illness and the vicissitudes of love, earthly as well as heavenly, occupying the space between desire and gratification, between pain and praise.

feast gently

Poetry. Waldrep's seventh collection begins where his prior collection, FEAST GENTLY, left off: "This / is how the witness ends: touch, withdraw; touch again," according to the opening poem in THE EARLIEST WITNESSES. If these are poems of witness, then they are also testators to the craft of seeing: eye-proofs of an epiphenomenal world. "Can you see this," the ophthalmologist in "A Mystic's Guide to Arches" asks over and over again. Sight becomes both the facilitator and impediment of desire, in collusion with language itself. "She said, When you say pear, I see p-e-a-r for a second before I see, in my mind's eye, a pear," Waldrep carefully records in "[West Stow Orchard Poem (II)]." The desire-poems in THE EARLIEST WITNESSES want the thing itself, its image of the mind, and the language that transmutes both thing and image into song.

The Earliest Witnesses