Bohr's Spinoza - Tapa blanda

Poetry. BOHR'S SPINOZA—an experiment in ambiance, lineation and energy exchange—is a book-length poem that alternates prose and verse sections. The prose rewrites the opening salvos of Spinoza's Ethics through a conversation between two people walking around a parking lot and talking about dogs, an actual dog in someone's yard, and people in a theater watching what turns out to be a film about two people walking around a parking lot and talking about dogs. The verse takes as a formal and procedural model the exchange of electrons to create energy as documented by the writings of Niels Bohr, attempting to replicate this exchange through the redeployment and exchange of the utterance within the poem's own sonic, rather than atomic, structure.

Noah Eli Gordon was born in Cleveland, OH, in 1975, and grew up there and in South Florida, then moved to Boston where he sold jewelry from a cart for several years while attending Bunker Hill Community College; this was followed by UMass-Amherst, where he eventually graduated from their Program for Poets & Writers, before moving west and settling in Denver, Colorado. His recent books include BOHR'S SPINOZA (Quale Press, 2017), THE WORD KINGDOM IN THE WORD KINGDOM (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2015), THE YEAR OF THE ROOSTER (Ahsahta Press, 2013), THE SOURCE (Futurepoem Books, 2011), and Novel Pictorial Noise (Harper Perennial, 2007), which was selected by John Ashbery for the National Poetry Series and subsequently chosen for the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award. His work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including THE VOLTA BOOK OF POETS (Sidebrow, 2014), THE FORCE OF WHAT'S POSSIBLE: WRITERS ON ACCESSIBILITY & THE AVANT- GARDE (Nightboat Books, 2014), Villanelles (Everyman's Library, 2012), Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology 2nd Edition (W.W. Norton, 2012), A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line (University of Iowa Press, 2011), Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (Northwestern University Press, 2011), and Poets on Teaching (University of Iowa Press, 2010), and was short-listed in The 2010 Best American Non-required Reading. An advocate of small press culture, he co-founded (with Joshua Marie Wilkinson) Letter Machine Editions, penned a column for five years on chapbooks for Rain Taxi: review of books, ran Braincase Press, was Head Reviews editor for The Volta, co-founded the little magazine Baffling Combustions, and has published numerous reviews, interviews, critical and journalistic writing. Currently, he teaches courses on poetry, poetics, publishing, and nonfiction for the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he directs Subito Press.