|
Winner of the Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for the Best Book in Poetry given by the Texas Institute of Letters
Description
"O for a muse of napalm . . ." Years in the making, As Long As It's Big is a stunning and unique poetic achievement. By turns rollicking, funny, and deeply moving, this dramatic poem tells a tragic story—the collapse of a marriage after the suicide of a child—within the topsy-turvy venue of a divorce court ruled by an alternately cynical and sentimental judge. John Bricuth cleanly balances sensitive portrayals of painful lives with hilarity, chaos, and occasionally ribald caricatures. Hugely entertaining and immensely readable, Bricuth's verse narrative will absorb anyone seeking to unravel the truths of modern family life.
Reviews
"In this brilliant, layered (and lawyered), Aesopic set of dialogues pertaining to a divorce hearing, the venality of the legal world is stunningly set off by the comparative goodness, decency, and generosity of a quietly eloquent and grief-stricken young couple over whom the court, in all its dubious majesty, presides. The grotesque worldliness and civilized barbarity of the representatives of law and order are brought face to face with deep human suffering and a simple nobility that moves the reader to admiration as well as pity. An astonishing work."—Anthony Hecht
"On the one hand, the shenanigans of a trio of scabrous, demonic lawyers, on the other, the anger and grief of the divorce court. Rubbing the one against the other, Bricuth strikes sparks of poetry as tragico-comical as life itself."—J. M. Coetzee
"Readers will delight in its mingled poignancy and slapstick, and will laugh aloud at virtuoso passages of Fieldism diction."—Richard Wilbur
"Here, John Bricuth perfects his startling new mode of American poetic tragicomedy. This exuberant chant of some 4,500 lines goes by with such force and quickness that I am surprised, on rereading, to discover it has concluded, with a kind of spontaneous combustion."—Harold Bloom
"If poems were roller coasters, this one would be The Cyclone: readers are advised to keep both hands on the rail and don't try to leave—you won't want to anyway—before it comes to an end."—Charles Martin
"I read it as a novel, almost in one sitting. Its narrative drive is compelling. There is suspense, comedy, wonderful language—both high and low brow—and powerful characters. Bricuth uses the courtroom the way the Elizabethans used the court—as the background for ambition and intrigue, which is finally that sad business of people, adultery, lust, hard work, and loss. This could be the only poem I've ever read that could be optioned for a movie. I am just knocked out by how good it is."—Max Apple
"As Long As It's Big joins together some of the funniest scenes you can imagine with a powerful and moving central story of love and grief, all told in a fluent, graceful verse and marked by this poet's wonderful mastery of the allusive music of a wide variety of contemporary American voices. A major work and a daring one."—George Garrett
"Like nothing you have ever seen. It's a polyphonic dialogue that's at once distanced from and uncomfortably close to realities that don't often get into poetry. It stings and delights, jolts and pleases. Philosophical medicine made palatable by wit and verve."—Guy Davenport
"Bricuth stakes out his claim to territory that no other American poet has trod. Here is an ironic spoof on the process of divorce law, a moving chronicle of a family falling apart, a war story, an outrageous comedy, a fireworks display of language and metaphor whose verve never falters, and what may be the most insightful comment on the game of mating and unmating since Anna Karenina."—X. J. Kennedy
"Bricuth's magnetically readable long song crackles with cynical laughter and pulses with all-too-human sadness."—Booklist
"Performed as a sonata . . .an ideal gift for anyone suffering through divorce."—Prairie Schooner
"It's a roller coaster of a narrative that is by turns hilarious, raunchy, slapstick, heartbreaking, tender, and sweet."—Johns Hopkins Magazine
Author Information
John Bricuth is the pen name of John T. Irwin, former editor of the Georgia Review and author of numerous works of literary criticism and poetry, including Just Let Me Say This About That, the inaugural volume in the Sewanee Writers' Series from the Overlook Press. He is the Decker Professor in the Humanities and former chair of the Writing Seminars at the Johns Hopkins University. In 2005 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His books include American Hieroglyphics, The Mystery to a Solution, and Doubling and Incest / Repetition and Revenge.
|
