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by: James Reiss
Amazon.com's Price: $17.95 Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 811
EAN: 9781844710317
ISBN: 1844710319
Label: Salt Publishing
Manufacturer: Salt Publishing
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 180
Publication Date: September 01, 2003
Publisher: Salt Publishing
Sales Rank: 1232809
Studio: Salt Publishing
Editorial Review:
Product Description:
This book is the winner of the 2005 Helen and Laura Krout Memorial Ohioana Poetry Award. This book contains poems from Reiss' first four books, as well as rollicking new work in his fifth volume, 'Slap Me Five' and his sixth collection of darkly humorous and downright hilarious rhyming satirical anti-war verse, 'A Child's Garden of Evil'. From the elegies and spiels in 'The Breathers' (1974), to the New York poems and Asian travel pieces in 'Express' (1983), to the homages to Mexico and the narratives in 'The Parable of Fire' (1996), to the cris de coeur and 'staircase stanzas' in Ten Thousand Good Mornings (2001), Reiss uses language memorably - memorizably - with musical and painterly effects. Whether you go along with 'New York Times' Book Review critic Helen Vendler, who wrote of 'The Breathers': 'In Reiss, poems are laid in drawers, folded in books; memories are like pictures cut out of magazines, inertia and insomnia are the two forms of life. Pursued by the same phantoms, which reappear on the telephone, in sequential rooms, in snapshots, in slides, Reiss writes them down in an accomplished plain style, with a momentum carrying whole poems along on the humming acceleration of a single sentence' - or you listen to Laurel Blossom, who wrote in 'The American Book Review', of 'Ten Thousand Good Mornings': 'Reiss can deploy rhyme, alliteration, assonance, the caesura, and a variety of poetic forms, from couplets to concrete, just for the fun of it, and with a skill that, more often than not, works for the poems rather than against them' - Reiss will not disappoint you.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating: - Who Is James Reiss?
After hearing James Reiss talk about poetry on my local NPR radio station, I got hold of Riff on Six and read it straight through. Over the years I've enjoyed such middle-aged Young Turks as Franz Wright and August Kleinzhaler, not to mention older poets like Mark Strand and Charles Simic. Well, I was blown away by the power of Reiss's New and Selected Poems. From page one, I was yanked from my chair emotionally by Reiss's elegies about his son. Maybe his initial lines foreshadowing an infant who ... Read More
Rating: - I give it SIXTY STARS and SIXTEEN Stripes!
What made me want to buy this book (which is like six books in one) before it hit the cyber-shelves, were the poems on the website "Buffalo Report" with zany titles like "I Want to Marry Ari" and "Making Do with DU." The political poems exceeded my expectations and were so comedic I felt like I was going to burst if I didn't tell all my (two) friends about it. But beyond that, I'm glad that I bought this book for the slant and internal rhyme, the conversational-style, the sestina, villanelle, sonnet, ... Read More
Rating: - A truly important book
This book riffs and raps along with Dr. Dre, as well as the first rapper, the sixteenth-century British poet, John Skelton. If you've wondered about the Iraq War, read these lines:
Now that we have liberation,
We must learn our occupation
Is to occupy the nation
We have conquered. Subjugation
Is the wrong term for salvation,
Just as Islam's desecration
Means Redemption in translation.
James Reiss's New and Selected Poems makes powerful personal ... Read More
Rating: - A vibrant yet poignant look at all the ages of a poet's work
With yet another sublime publication by James Reiss, how could we not open the pages of Riff On Six to find language that pulls us through a universe of sound and image so haunting it tugs on the heart? There could not be a more beautiful selection of Jame Reiss' work than the poems that reside here, between the covers of Riff On Six. Read it and understand where contemporary poetry must be.
Rating: - Riff on Six Proves Poetry Can Be Exciting
Fresh off his Pulitzer Prize nominated book "Ten Thousand Good Mornings!" Jim Reiss delivers with a book of best of and best yet to come. I've read a good deal of poetry, and as a young Gen X'er, it's hard to find quality poetry to connect with; there are the poets a person should like, but like medicine they are hard to swallow. "Riff on Six" is the spoon of sugar the world of poetry needed. This book, spanning his four collections from four separate decades, shows that Mr. Reiss is probably the most underappreciated ... Read More
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