Rim is a man who works and thinks mainly with his body, a thinking farmhand, someone who labors physically and sees through things to a deeper level or core at times making spiritual sense also. Rim is a story, a prosepoem, and a metaphysical investigation as one occasion. The sense of poetry in the prose comes through both constant juxtaposition of images and rhythmic qualities created through line-breaks and word-savorings. Rim breaks down usual notions of inside/outside, linear/non-linear, and creates a way of felling human "place" in a larger animate continuum.
This book is one of storied life and of collage. Each part of the story is interrupted or disrupted by sudden insertions of words (in boldface) from the separate books and authors listed in the Glossolalia (a pun on Glossary) to effect a "speaking in tongues" throughout the work. This book asks the reader to follow a story and simultaneously allow insistent "voices" to break in. Any presumed parallels to the disease of schizophrenia should be immediately thrown out. The book may be read alone or read aloud by at least two people.
This volume also includes the first publication of To the Wave, Poetry at Seacoasts, a complete book in honor of ocean and what sense of things the author has found on and around various coastal beaches in the United States, including experiences of things both easily observed and not readily seen. It is a lyrical, metaphysical and loving exploration made of notes, aphorisms, collages, poems and prosepoem sections building (as waves do) toward final destinations. The title also indicates a way of bowing "to the wave" that is the next and the next physical presence within great ocean, but also "to the wave" that is the ultimate, imagined, engulfing totality anyone may feel and find.
Praise for David Giannini’s previous publications:
"But I don’t see how any close reader won’t come away learning a great deal about the potential in quotation, the distinctness of first lines & the possibilities of form. That’s a lot for a project of this scope to accomplish."
—Ron Silliman
"To draw on others’ lines so neatly and discreetly and wisely and well is a rare feat and one anyone can savor who opens this charming chapbook."
—Cid Corman
"It’s the most exciting thing that’s come down the pike in a long time."
—Bob Arnold
"Yes, it’s very deftly done, and there is much that is both attractive and amusing: Paul Pines, Charles Olson, and Howard Nemerov as bedfellows is a bit difficult to imagine, but [the] result is convincing. What comes through to me is the likenesses between all human beings, no matter how differently they may perceive things. It certainly must have been a colossal undertaking."
—Theodore Enslin
"These are poems that succeed most of the time as poetry and carry a real spiritual impact. And [Giannini's] way of using the whole page, if necessary, to get the space/time equivalents [he] needs may transform all of our writing."
— Robin Magowan
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