Come In Alone

By Anselm Berrigan

• Description
• Reviews
  

• New York poet Anselm Berrigan plays with space like a painter with the prosody of a poet. Written as infinitely looping sentences around the page, the rectangular poems of Come In Alone act as a frame to space, outrunning thought with quickness, openness, humor, and protest. They are simultaneously inviting and impermeable, making familiar language uncanny with every turn around the page.
  
  Listed in the top poetry books of spring 2016 by Publishers Weekly

• Anselm Berrigan has taken it upon himself to write a book of poetry well beyond any conventional parameters. Come In Alone operates outside of whatever categorical box you might attempt to place it in, whether that may be classical or contemporary, academic or experimental. This is undoubtedly poetry but it’s not a book of poems in any conventional sense.
  Patrick James Dunagan, The Rumpus
  
  This is a highly innovative collection that deeply understands the form it has chosen, and it is definitely worth your attention beyond mere curiosity.
  Ryo Yamaguchi, NewPages
  
  Composed entirely of margin-hugging, rectangular poems that can be read starting at any point and loop without end, this collection is a rare breakthrough in form… As Berrigan’s language loops on, endlessly recontextualized, what results is a kind of commentary through form, the creation of an expanse through physical limitation.
  Publishers Weekly
  
  Complete sentences are optional and of little consequence here, meanings accrue through the pile up of phrases [...] Are these even poems? If not, so what? They’re something, alive and swirling on the page kicking off sparks of possibility for anyone who’ll read around and spend some time in them.
  Steve Potter, Medium
  
  The textures here merge physical and personal space of the poem, the inner and outer, into a Beckettian kind of negation and distortion, simultaneously inventing and dismantling identity and context […] Cryptically and compellingly, Come In Alone beckons you to enter it, take hold of it, spin it, and never leave it alone.
  Jon Curley, Hyperallergic
  
  The physical act of...turning around...the book to continue reading…emphasizes the role of reader-involvement through no less than the body. Perhaps the idea then of Come In Alone is to enter the book as a reader only to come out of it seeing yourself or part of yourself. The poem, after all, can also act as a mirror.
  Eileen Tabios, Galatea Resurrects