Jargon
by Brian Clements

ISBN: 978-1-935835-00-4
Perfect Bound, $14.00
Publication Date: December 2010
5 x 8 inches, 132 pages
PROSE POETRY

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All too aware of language's inability to reveal real answers or to calm the cold and hard world we inhabit, in Jargon Brian Clements nonetheless revels in the places where we settle into “language's sly do-overs,” into meaning—communication, identity, the making of art, religion and its replacements, each other—hoping to emerge from the dark places of the universe (e quindi uscimmo) to see again sunlight.The prose poems in Jargon are haunted by the ghosts of form, rhetoric, narrative, argument—the cultural forms that make the world familiar yet tend to abandon us when we need them most (such as in times of war, or in times of economic collapse). Like its prequel, And How to End It (Quale Press, 2009) this book seems to rise ab nihilo in search of a beginning and an end—a cause and a purpose.

From Jargon...

We Spank Your Language

Today we spank your language. Yet we least to measure the demon in your tongue. It is an arrow to keep the people alive. The real people are cans to burn your words to the point of sickness. We are sick with these, and our liver swells with burning wraiths. We burrow into your emissions. There we found you believe only what is impossible. To it we contribute your tense to harm. We must presume that you are either mad or drinking, and to quiver with a drink is to fight a man who isn't there. You see us. You refer to us. You are the ones who ask fish questions. You said "The man saw a dog" and expects us to click on the light. We had already been there and absorbed your false reading. We find you readily sieve what befits you much. Such will we spank your language to be there peace. Give us the verbal and the nuns. Then we reap your savage tongue to crowd together the many thoughts. You spanked your word and a spanked word cannot be but red. We requisite only your sign on this finger of smoke and that Carthage must be destroyed.

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