A companion to the critically acclaimed My Way, his 1999 montage of
essays, conversations, and poems, With Strings catapults Charles
Bernstein into the future of American poetry. A compilation of
sixty-nine poems in various forms and styles, dating mostly from the
1990s, With Strings is his most buoyant collection to date. With its
fractured nursery rhymes, distressed mottoes, runcible riddles, and
inscrutable sayings, Bernstein takes us on a poetic trip that swerves
from the comic to the political, from the whimsical to the elegiac. The
whole presents a densely sounded echo chamber in which a range of
themes, moods, and perceptions extend and reverberate.
Charles Bernstein is perhaps best known as one of the founders of the
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry movement of the 1970s. He remains one of
America's liveliest advocates and practitioners of radically inventive
poetry. The title of his new collection, With Strings, suggests the
lush arrangement of a musical work as well as the unacknowledged
implications of our everyday agreements. Just as language binds us
together with its associated meanings, With Strings bounces against
the ties that rend us apart as they fasten us together. From his
samplings of everyday life, to his demented yet sonorous iambic beats,
Bernstein has once again created a poetry of our time, for our time, and
by our time.