Robert Manery

As They Say

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rob mclennan’s review of As They Say

“Don’t we always have a situation?” Rob Manery asks in poetry that induces the levitating voice to subside, to hesitate, and to “quit the wrong way.” The resounding poems in As They Say disrupt the “utterly settled” as they greet the unwedgeable and the fortuitous, misspending “rented diction,” and risking symmetry. Working with sentences torn and circumcised from the upwardly mobile canon and from hastily unwritten “intentless” murmurings, Manery splendidly incites readers to “to think out loud” and to “get mithered”!

Nicole Markotić, author of After Beowulf

Rob Manery’s new collection files the serial number off politicians’ and Jesuits’ favorite form of lying: the equivocation. For Hegel, certainty led to skepticism, for Wittgenstein, it led to expunged sentences, for Manery, the texts that survive his combinatorial wizardry are a tree ring carbon record, an online browser footprint, a hall with a silent you. Read this book and then steal from it, these are the best poems ever run thru a front-end handling syntax and semantics compiler.

Clint Burnham, author of White Lie

These poems invent a poetic diction, mixing heady with quaint in Land-of-Cockaigne stylistic abundance. Words current, rare, archaic, and obsolete are found in As They Say syntactically pasted together in humorous tonal blends of near and far. Beckett’s cogito impishly skips about as bare life on each page, poised between certainty and equivocation, performing speech acts at one remove from speech. The page then drops all lyric disguises when read as in dialogue with paradigmatic ethical conundra sourced from Sophocles, Donne, and Wittgenstein (among others). But the argument is musical and crisp, the lines lean, deliciously dry with principled aloofness. Robert Manery gives the post-Language proceduralist moment back to the present.

Louis Cabri, author of Hungry Slingshots