Reviews

Tenney Nathanson
Erased Art
ISBN 0-925904-51-1
112 pages
$16

this is the era of
venetian blind
man’s bluff in the buff
draperies
then static

Tenney Nathanson’s Erased Art gives us a wild and exciting tour through the “venetian/ blind man’s / bluff” of our 21st century landscape, replete with collage-stories in which Madame Bovary, Bill Clinton, Georgia O’Keefe, Karl Marx, and a host of minor characters from old movies and heroes of National Enquirer stories meet and find out what they have in common. This astonishing poetic tapestry, whose learned references to the poetics of the great Modernists are juxtaposed to fragments of Drudge Report-speak and academic absurdities, is as hilarious as it is heart-breaking.

— Marjorie Perloff

Tenney Nathanson is Associate Professor of English at the University of Arizona, where from 1993-1996 he served as Director of the PhD program in Literature and Coordinator of Graduate Studies for the Department of English. His poems have appeared in such journals as Jacket, Kenning, Antennae, can we have our ball back?,The LA Review, Social Text, The Massachusetts Review, Ironwood, Sonora Review, Caterpillar, Tamarisk, RIF/T3 and RIF/T5. He has published two chapbooks, The Book of Death (Membrane Press, 1975) and One Block Over (Chax Press, 1998). Chax will publish a full-length collection of Nathanson's poetry, Erased Art, in 2004. Current creative projects include a book-length poem, "Home on the Range (The Night Sky with Stars in My Mouth)," and a chapbook, "After Rilke," to include Nathanson's poems as well as work by local calligrapher Don Lightner. His critical study Whitman's Presence was published by NYU in 1992 and reprinted in 1994, and he is currently at work on a book about the contemporary poets John Ashbery, Charles Bernstein, Leslie Scalapino, Norman Fischer, and David Shapiro.