Overview

"Award-winning poet explores new formal terrain in seven long poems against the violence of the present political moment. ""[Warren] has begun writing longer poems, putting her stamp on a running notational mode whose other practitioners include Stephanie Young, Anselm Berrigan, and Jacqueline Waters. I think you can hear the durational projects, the self-conscious day-scores, of Bernadette Mayer and of Lewis Warsh farther back in the tradition.""-Brian Blanchfield, pen.org The third full-length collection from Bay Area poet Alli Warren, Little Hill comprises seven long poems written with propulsive prosody in a daybook fashion, examining our present, politically charged moment. These poems are at once energetic and contemplative, intimate and direct, as Warren focuses her attention on capitalism, gender, love, inequality, and resistance. Despite the dystopian now, Warren finds promise in the smallest human instances of tenderness, ecological connection, and political solidarity. Little Hill is about learning to live and love in the 21st century while not shying away from all there is to struggle against. Praise for Little Hill: ""In Little Hill Alli Warren's principle method is articulation of exquisite units of speech (thought) that, maintaining separation, are capable of connection. The line might be a sentence or a part of one ... I mean a delicious sense of grammatical distinctness is maintained. The poet, also a lone unit, seems to exist less in relation than as that lone one, condemning this hard world with its villain work and elusive hierarchies. The language is precise, lush, unexpected and often thrilling. Articulation would seem to be the true other, or maybe nature is. The book is gift more than condemnation, though as the latter it's unsparing. Still, it's a gift.""-Alice Notley, author of For the Ride and Benediction ""The number of gasps and everything else gets lost in the concentration of Little Hill. Alli Warren keeps company with those rare poets whose every new book is their best. 'This is an old machine with a pulley / It makes music work,' Warren writes, reworking the ancient technology of poetry to a shine! Dear Poet, thank you for the wow WOW wowing!""-CAConrad, author of While Standing in Line for Death"

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9780872868052

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Praise for I Love It Though: [Warren] has begun writing longer poems, putting her stamp on a running notational mode whose other practitioners include Stephanie Young, Anselm Berrigan, and Jacqueline Waters. I think you can hear the durational projects, the self-conscious day-scores, of Bernadette Mayer and of Lewis Warsh farther back in the tradition. -Brian Blanchfield, pen.org These poems invite the reader into an uncanny immersion within the quotidian-akin to tasting the sharpness of sky color or watching song penetrate office walls. Taken together, their power rests not in the visionary aim of Rimbaud's derangement of the senses, but in the willful blurring of the material limits of language-a rich verbal synesthesia that suggests a collective politics of bodies: muscle, blood and bone. -Jamie Townsend, Boston Review Warren provides us with poetry that proves that the smallest interactions with the ordinary world can bring a whisper of hope to those who simply want to adore Earth's extraordinary offerings. -Tay Marie Lorenzo, Fields Magazine Warren finds sublimity in strands of affect and experience that cling to the ultimate unanswerable. -Small Press Distribution In I Love It Though, growing authority and growing bewilderment appear to be out on a date, perhaps married, the bottom / of the surface of the sound never not in effect. Propelled by closely parsed internal commotion, the book is a great follow-up to Here Come the Warm Jets, itself a great follow-up to the earlier books that rightly put Alli Warren on the map as a poet to watch, be reckoned with, read and reread. -Nathaniel Mackey Where were you when the very bird Alli Warren winged in upon opened its beak & began to speak? I was in Queens. My jaw dropped. Actually it was Alli ventriloquizing the bird, right there on my windowsill, with the pigeons in the airshaft. As I greedily thumb through the pages, honey seeps through the cracks, 'one gape follows the next.' -Julian Talamantez Brolaski The title of Alli Warren's rich and various collection of new poems-I Love It Though-should alert readers to one of its prevailing moods, that of a skeptic's affirmation. Being that of a skeptic, the affirmation comes with reservations. Alli Warren knows there are limits to the possibilities of any given day. She writes from the experiences of attuned observations, surveying the landscape with a hesitant but not unwilling participant's attention to interplays of detail. She tracks ridge and crevice, inclination and fold; they belong to the topography of social landscapes and the bodies in them and also to the structures of her articulated thoughts. Days take place, abounding with forms. And thus it is that, with respect to affirmation, these poems begin with reservations. But they do not end there. If skeptical affirmation is one of this book's moods, love is another. It is shaped out of the quicknesses of Warren's attention, guiding her embrace of the specific given good and her grief over all that's malevolent. This is a powerful and beautiful book, and the poems that comprise it should be read over and over again. -Lyn Hejinian Praise for Here Come the Warm Jets: Warren's first book of poems is highly self-reflective, interestingly interrogative, and a lot of fun. -Booklist Though she may be excoriating the system, Warren has fun doing it, however, with a willingness to always go for a dirty joke . . . This dead-pan tone belies the slyly crafted humor of her wordplay, which mashes up multiple registers for comic, sometimes cutting effect . . . Even as Warren's poems dance away from any notion of a fixed self . . . a tender undercurrent runs throughout, and the closing 'Personal Poem'-comprising a series of second-person commands-offers a roundabout glimpse into the poet's more quotidian inspirations, while offering some sage advice: 'Don't talk too much about language in mixed company.' -American Poet Here Come the Warm Jets starts by cycling through swaths of factless job-voice before pitching an unfolding exuberant doom-diction through the book's positively evil prosodic middle. Relative time, absolute time, ornery time, palpation time, and a kind of time I can't name are all in play along the way. I think Warren's end of capitalism would come with the richest planes of full life, but only the poems and their upending of the never-ending blossom hull make me think so. -Anselm Berrigan Alli Warren unfixes belief in these poem-feeds while never dissolving it. The effect is a kind of infinitely mobile fandom with occasional sparkes. -Lisa Robertson When form and form's fiance come maundering Alli Warren will undo them both with tart prepositional gambits and the vagaries of fortune-telling and a fine poker-faced command of stagecraft itself. With nods to the congress of manners (and hat tips too to Brooks, Duncan, and others) Here Come the Warm Jets plays at neither checking nor abashing but chronicles what it just might be to be beyond the reach of any drama, any architecture. This is one heavenly book. -C. S. Giscombe

Author Information

Alli Warren published her Poetry Center Book Award-winning debut, Here Come the Warm Jets, with City Lights in 2013. She is also the author of I Love It Though (Nightboat Books, 2017), as well as numerous chapbooks. She has edited the literary magazine Dreamboat, co-curated the (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand, co-edited the Poetic Labor Project, and contributed to SFMOMA's Open Space. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Harpers, Poetry, The Brooklyn Rail, and BOMB. She has lived and worked in the Bay Area since 2005.

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