Phantom Pains of Madness

By Noelle Kocot

• Description
• Reviews
• Bio

• Noelle Kocot recalls a break with reality that occurred a decade and a half ago in vivid, raw language, one word per line. The resulting slender columns are sharply focused and intense. There's a cult following for her unique imagination, self-professed in a poem as “filled with pulchritude and peopleness,” and her seventh collection does not disappoint.

• Kocot follows Soul in Space with a collection that should further confirm some readers’ views of her as a visionary poet called to despair or ecstasy, delight or shame, by forces beyond her control.
  Publishers Weekly
  
  

  As faith in language and in God weave in and out of possibly skewed perceptions, what object of desire could be so unwavering as to provide satisfaction? [Phantom Pains of Madness] ends with the image of a light green bug hopping from “word / into / sun.” So, too, does Kocot hop through language—into the self, into want, into God, and into whimsy, desire, and beauty.
  Erin Lyndal Martin, Tarpaulin Sky
  
  The book pushes forward one foot at a time in the most literal poetic sense. And therein enters this sense that life is unfolding. There is no need for rigidity. Kocot has learned to parse the planet and her world one unit at a time. This is the most appealing and noteworthy part of the book. A commitment, to never falter from the solution and layout to the work. In this, the connection can be seen between Phantom Pains and the human experience and the way in which quality art moves us between.
  Benjamin Champagne, NewPages
  
  

• Noelle Kocot is the author of many collections of poetry, including Ascent of the Mothers (November 2023), God's Green Earth (Wave Books, 2020), Phantom Pains of Madness (Wave Books, May 2016), Soul in Space (Wave Books, 2013), The Bigger World (Wave Books, 2011), and a book of translations of some of the poems of Tristan Corbière, Poet by Default (Wave Books, 2011). Their previous works include the discography Damon's Room, (Wave Books Pamphlet Series, 2010), Sunny Wednesday (Wave Books, 2009) and Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems (Wave Books, 2006). They are also the author of 4 and The Raving Fortune (both from Four Way Books). Their poems have been anthologized in Best American Poetry in 2001, 2012, and 2013. They are the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, The Fund for Poetry, the American Poetry Review, and a residency fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. Kocot has taught at the University of Texas New Writers' Project and currently teaches in the Creative Writing Department at the New School. They live in New Jersey.