CHATTY FOSSILS
by Bob Perelman
Bob Perelman’s new Roof title Chatty Fossils proves how wisdom is bound to wit. He shows by example how “I neither are / nor am you”. These verses capture the amusing and tragic moments of everyday thought. Readers will be pleased to know that “…it’s green lights / farther than anyone can possibly imagine.” Then Perelman’s line breaks introduce the sad facts of the current moment: “Santa’s inbox / is full this year.” Chatty Fossils talks to the reader to let us know that the world as we know it is still in place. But as politics torques reality today, Perelman’s moebius poems twist to make even our antagonisms appear on the reader’s side of the page. During the editing process we on the Roof staff were reading his lines to each other. We are sure you’ll enjoy Chatty Fossils.
Praise for Bob Perelman
In this new collection, Chatty Fossils, Bob Perelman probes the zeitgeist with an
anthropologist’s zeal for detail and an ironist's ear for the dis in public discourse. These poems leave no doubt about the present civilizational crisis, but even the most dire come off with the wry humor of someone who loves the world for what it is. They love to “talk poetry.” Chatty indeed, but far from fossils.
– Jean Day
“How we doin?” the chatty fossils of Chatty Fossils seem to ask in this status report on our socio-politico-enviro condition, in which poets sing inside canary cages of a toxic environment and “the arc of justice may be too long / to live through.” But in poems infused with Perelman’s trademark comic demotic gravitas “that doesn't mean it’s not worth living” and the “aromatic sizzle” of human consciousness is still worth a pleasurable whiff.
– Evelyn Reilly
In Chatty Fossils, Bob Perelman distills what it means to be alive in our language and mortal bodies with all their historical, cultural and daily complexity. Perelman attends to human life with a warm, embodied, humorous and incisive tone. Perelman embraces “satisfaction with finitude” “in the good enough air.” I’m grateful we can add these poems of humility, wit and wisdom to the fossil record.
– Alli Warren
About the Author
Bob Perelman’s numerous books of poems include Jack and Jill in Troy; Iflife; Playing Bodies, in collaboration with painter Francie Shaw; and Ten to One: Selected Poems. Critical books include The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History;
The Trouble With Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky, and Modernism the Morning After. He is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Pennsylvania. His website is http://writing.upenn.edu/pepc/authors/perelman/.