We are delighted to announce that Professor Dean Brink has published his latest book, No Time!
There are no dull sentences in this complex and rewarding collection; prepare
to be dazzled by words and images drawn from across time, space, and
the Pacific—from four-god barley soup to the activist-martyr Ben Linder
to “bubblegum under an antique table.” Dean Brink’s poems practice the
best kind of brinksmanship: like John Ashbery’s, they walk to the edge of
difficulty without sacrificing specificity or, in the end, meaning.
–Angela Sorby, Professor of English
I could not avoid the sense that in reading Brink we are engaging an Ashbery
hardened by living in a new almost impenetrable America. There is the same
ability to hear a language of feeling within or because of the poet’s distance,
and, in the last and best poem in the volume, there is the unfolding of a prose
mode of description that highlights the lyrical sensibility. … Talking becomes
the paradigm for being “here” and “not here” at the same time—a condition
by which Brink seems to want to add a dramatic intensity to Ashbery’s mask
of playful freedom.
-Charles Altieri
Reading this book gave me that tickly feeling of solving complex riddles after
wrangling with dazzling quandaries hidden in plain sight. From analyzing
the finest filtrations of war logics, to reverse engineering the contemporary
Pleistocene’s moral landscape, Brink keeps us saddled up and eager to
vamoose.
-Rodrigo Toscano
Dean Brink modulates humorous memories and imaginative twists to
enter into dialogue with this absurd and crosswired world, proposing a very
personal explanation of the necessity of poetry.
-Hung Hung, poet and founder of Dark Eyes Performance Lab
