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CIVIL NOIR

by Melanie Neilson

"The poems collected here, in Melanie Neilson's Civil Noir, are not ideesfixes but incitements, instigations. Developing out of remarkable particularities and juxtapositions, each of which may serve as a rapid and beautiful preparation for thinking about the virtue of vitality-they engender it too. But the book is not about momentum. It is about the expansion of any moment of perception into all of its parts, and it is to this purpose that the works are so carefully shaped on the page."- Lyn Hejinian

"Here's a roller-coaster of precision tugs & whooshes, idiom hazards & word radiation to help us up the ante & effervesce the nineteen-nineties. Ultra-ink, formal kindling, habit-suppressant, post-acrobatic: the max."- Bruce Andrews