LOST AND FOUND
by Michael Gottlieb
"Lost and Found by Michael Gottlieb stresses the 9/11 poetry genre to the limit. In “The Dust” he lists with clenched jaw items found in the rubble of the downed Towers, moving from computer terminals and memos to the human side, driving through his list with all the impact of the most intense lyric poem. But Lost and Found goes beyond 9/11 to the rest of the world, exposing the situation we find ourselves in, a droll conversation of partially identified yet fully understandable characters: “how much smaller may we dice you”. No poet writing today captures the immediate sense of being caught off guard.Lost and Found is a read-this-&-change-your-life experience: the first great poetic work to emerge from the trauma of September 11. Imagine Frank O’Hara channeling Teodor Adorno with more than a little Marcel Duchamp to modulate the static into a whitenoise reverb feedback loop. It is, in fact, just like that & completely different: three radical works that test our limits as readers & as people. Michael Gottlieb’s masterwork is one terrific book."
- Ron Silliman
"In exquisitely thrown and sculpted lines, Gottlieb ergonomically carves and sifts through lost and found language to create poems we need. The cumulative effect of these profound serial works register ‘through and through’ and name the time-sensitive events of all our daily offices."
- Lee Ann Brown
"I’m staying up late night during the Big Blackout, reading Michael Gottlieb’s Lost and Found, activated by flashlight (& votive red Corazon candle). Even the facts are pastiches, tuning up the overspecified, “prostrate from abject” & “not unlike an exaggerated startle response” to the doxauthorities, in a slo’-syruped ‘DJ Screw’ pace. “A kind of risorgimento / of the unacknowledged” goes into syndication to rescind their ways of making us shut up, vouching for a counter-resolution."
- Bruce Andrews