Mimer
Mimer
“With their uncanny quality of attention and gnomic precision, Lance Phillips’ brilliant poems readily accord neither with our normative arrangements of language nor with our manifest schemas of perception. This book is both an ingenious meditation of, and a “Disportraiture” of, the transitory and miraculous nature of the world’s assemblages, our provisional and thrilling success at description and understanding, our incapacity for thoroughly fathoming the real, and the necessity of continuing to try."
-GABRIEL GUDDING
"Lance Phillips writes near-hieroglyphics in the American dust and loves it. Grief is here, as it always is, but Mimer is also laced with the pleasures of having gotten something said by having made a body hum. Allegoric, algorithmic, and beautifully un-gorgeous, it’s a book worth working through and running through you."
-GRAHAM FOUST
review of Mimer by Peter Vanderberg
Mimer is a riddle told by the sphinx. Read “riddle” as spare, enigmatic poems that confuse and seduce. Read “sphinx” as ancient quandary, primal question, mortal dilemma, classical figure, myth, author.
One can say opal until one’s tongue swells.
One hawk may not mean mouth at risk.
Those two lines comprise the entire poem entitled, “From Nietzsche’s Bed” and that is the same title given for eleven poems, all from the section “From Nietzsche’s Bed.” So many questions spool out from these two spare lines. Is this an instruction for reading the book? Is this a truth about the body? Is this a warning? Such is the dilemma and pleasure of Mimer. MORE
THE VOLTA
