After 9/11, postmodernism and irony were declared dead. Charles
Bernstein here proves them alive and well in poems elegiac, defiant, and
resilient to the point of approaching song. Heir to the democratic and
poetic sensibilities of Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, Bernstein has
always crafted verse that responds to its historical moment, but no
previous collection of his poems so specifically addresses the events of
its time as Girly Man, whichfeatures works written on the evening of
September 11, 2001, and in response to the war in Iraq. Here, Bernstein
speaks out, combining self-deprecating humor with incisive philosophical
and political thinking.
Composed of works of very different forms and moods--etchings from
moments of acute crisis, comic excursions, formal excavations,
confrontations with the cultural illogics of contemporary political
consciousness--the poems work as an ensemble, each part contributing
something necessary to an unrealizable and unrepresentable whole.
Indeed, representation--and related claims to truth and moral
certainty--is an active concern throughout the book. The poems of Girly
Man may be oblique, satiric, or elusive, but their sense is emphatic.
Indeed, Bernstein's poetry performsits ideas so that they can be
experienced as well as understood.
A passionate defense of contingency, resistance, and multiplicity,
Girly Man is a provocative and aesthetically challenging collection of
radical verse from one of America's most controversial poets.
