Bøker av C. S. Giscombe

"Negro Mountain is the name of a ridge in the Allegheny Mountains in Pennsylvania--its summit is in fact the highest elevation in the state. Named for a Black man who was killed fighting on the side of his white masters against Indigenous peoples during a scouting expedition to the region in the mid-eighteenth century, this mountain ridge is also the metaphorical center of C. S. Giscombe's sixth full-length book of poetry. Negro Mountain is a subtle, erudite interrogation of the contact zones where Blackness, white supremacy, Indigeneity, and endangered animal populations enter into complex and multifaceted dialectics of survival and erasure. From the vantage of this ridge, Giscombe maps the psychogeography of surrounding region and the tangled human and nonhuman forces that have shaped it. To say that such work is strictly 'regional, ' however, is to underestimate Giscombe's commitment to and deep engagement with the archive, and his poetry deftly connects relevant points across time and space, from the mid-Pleistocene period to nineteenth-century Jamaica to the vilest corners of the internet. This saturation of sources, voices, and modes yields a parallax synthesis of the personal and the historical-all filtered through the singular voice of a poet who has been honing his craft for decades"--

Similarly four complete poetry books and a selection of new poems and sequences—samples the ongoing project of C. S. Giscombe’s long, long song of location and range.  In all the work collected here, location is a practice; range is the fact of the serial, the figuring of continuous arrival. The writing speaks to rivers, the souls of city life, animals, the counted and uncounted, the many instances that might indicate “a shape to all that sound,” monstrosity and argument (the latter defined, with a hat-tip to Frankenstein, as “a thing that becomes terrifying to its maker”), and the colors of human migration, these things among others.  In the “Cry Me a River” poem, Giscombe writes, "for the sake of argument, say that the shape of a region or of some distinct areas of a city could stand in for memory and that it—the shape is a specific value because it’s apparent and public, and that way achieves an almost nameless contour."

"Train Music chronicles the 2017 four-day railroad trip (New York to California) of poet C. S. Giscombe and book artist Judith Margolis, old friends. Giscombe was returning home to address an all-white audience on white supremacy; expatriate Margolis, usually solitary and itinerant, was visiting the country of her birth, drawing scenery and collaging insomniac night visions. Journeying, conversing, arguing, sharing memories, they document a complex and volatile American landscape, one at once geographical and historical, one holding specific implications for the lives of both. Margolis and Giscombe chart their own passage through all that, through a dangerous and puzzling world that-too often-"passes as normal." Train Music is the insistent and unlikely shape that the two sensibilities achieve"--

A chapbook-length poem that explores the cultural and personal weight of Ohio's rail history