Synopses & Reviews
Each portion forming a reduced-size copy of the whole, a fractal is forever fragmented, both chaotic and ordered, endlessly complex. Timothy Green’s American Fractal sees this pattern emerge from the fabric of modern culture, as it navigates the personal, the political, and the metaphysical, in a lyric dreamscape in which an eerie chaos lurks just behind the facade of order — where "what looks like / a river...could be a log," "...as if accident were / the fundamental attribute of life." In separate poems, one man sells ad space on his forehead, while another examines the multitudes of his own voice on an audio cassette recorder. Each life is but another section of the fractal, the past and the future two mirrors that face each other to perpetuate the illusion of infinites. At turns evocative and sweetly ironic, Green straddles the line between accessibility and complexity, exploring "how the wind whispers our secrets," how "that little tremor" of understanding "touches your sleeve, lets go."
Review
"Unpredictable, uproarious, and true to the wonder of the moment, Green’s poems are chockfull of magical imagery that blurs the waking and dream life." Denise Duhamel, author of Queen for a Day and Kinky
Review
"This book has the gift of passion. It has fire at its core." James Ragan, author of The Hunger Wall and Lusions
About the Author
Timothy Green was born in Rochester, New York, in 1980. He worked in an mRNA research lab, and as a group home counselor for mentally ill adults, before moving west to serve as editor of the poetry journal RATTLE. His poems have appeared in many journals, including The Connecticut Review, The Florida Review, Fugue, Mid-American Review, and Nimrod International Journal. Green has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and is winner of the 2006 Phi Kappa Phi award from the University of Southern California. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the poet Megan O’Reilly Green. American Fractal is his first book-length collection.
Table of Contents
Contents:
I
The Body 8
Thanksgiving Was Over 10
Some Proof 11
To Montevideo 12
Hip 13
Midnight Mass 14
“Fifty-Hour Online Gaming Binge Proves Fatal” 16
Her Face Once 18
The Memory of Water 19
Poem from the Homeland 20
II
Poem from Dark Matter 22
Poem for the Valentines 23
Hiking Alone 24
Hiking Together 26
Beach Scene 27
2.9 28
What Passes for Optimism at MacArthur Park 29
How I’d Explain It 30
Playing Our Part 31
American Fractal 32
III
Cooking Dinner 36
After Hopper 38
Meditation on the Six Healing Sounds 39
“High on Hog” 40
Microcassette 41
Pot Luck 43
On the Phone My Mother 44
Before the Flood 45
Diorama 46
Beating Balaam’s Ass 47
IV
Old Mother Tarantula 49
Man Auctions Ad Space on Forehead 50
The Sense of Being Looked At 51
The Good Times 52
Pluots and Apriums 53
Cutlery 54
Impressionism 56
A Tourist’s Guide Through Big Sky Country 57
Apocrypha 58
Vigilance: What You’ll Miss 59
V
White Noise 61
Applauding the Gods 62
Saddled 64
The Urge to Break Things 65
Family Tree 66
A Letter to Someone I Barely Remember 67
The Bending of Birches 68
A Constant Lack of Hunger 70
Cheers 71
In the Parking Lot of Our Dreams 72