Books

Thirteen thumbnail sketches in a semi-causally related sequence that more or less maps out what it was like to be the author from, say, 1996 to 2011, with a judicious feint or two toward the back story where appropriate.

“The reach of this exuberant and anguished book is potent, and made more so by the force of restraint. The subjects TJ Beitelman encounters here — beauty, love, sin, being, thought, felicity — are driven through the sieve of American culture, and out comes fragments, the leavings of what we were once instructed to value. Part of the edifice is gone, eroded, demeaned, cheapened, misused. At some point, however, the voice behind these deadpan yet lyrically fluid poems realizes how naïve it would be to reject outright the grace of descent, because that would erase the possibility of coming back. This is a book about coming back, coming back to being whole and wholly changed. And what a moving, intelligent, and measured book it is.” — Maurice Manning, author of The Common Man

“In Order to Form a More Perfect Union is a book obsessed with divisions…narrative ones, yes — love stories end in daggers, road trips end in cliffs…but also other sorts of fissures. When Beitelman writes the word half-hearted, he means not desultory but desperately searching (in material ranging pretty much from Homer to Hollywood) for the missing half.  And these breaks are, in his sensibility, “a blessed thing.” It is spectacular to watch his poems upend everything. In this book, the paint squeezes its artist from the tube. The facts are not to be believed, but you will ardently believe that they are facts.” — Darcie Dennigan, author of Corinna A-maying the Apocalypse

“Jam-packed with the materials of American history and culture, TJ Beitelman’s poems are wonders to behold, set loose and spinning across forms, eras, and landscapes. From hopeful new-dawn visions to dark Jeremiads to softly flowing elegies, they capture voices and ideas from the main stems of American thought, with a smart, questioning energy that’s remarkable to follow. The book ultimately leads to a rocketing road trip into American politics, music, and dreams unlike any other you’ll ever find — hilarious, mysterious, brilliant and absurd in all the right ways, just like the U.S.A.” — Jim Murphy, author of Heaven Overland

“Jude Law and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, ‘dusty and dry and alone,’ ‘their minds a certain kind of wild,’ light out for the territories in a red Edsel, in search of something, but find nothing, and so realize their only recourse is to ‘make a something of a nothing,’ specifically a something which can accommodate Las Vegas, candle tricks, Emily Dickinson, and a ghost town ‘shrine of We-Don’t-Know.’ Beitelman takes us on a pilgrimage both sensual and metaphysical, both comic and tragic, warning us against ‘shimmer, shine, and show’ while delivering us bushels of each.” — Joel Brouwer, author of And So

“Beitelman’s voice is sure as we navigate a roadmap between oasis and urban beehive, clarifications on loneliness, aloneness, and solitude. The ‘pilgrims’ in this sequence desire a fresh authenticity (of self and in relationship), but are finally left only to stare: ‘…There’s no one left but / You to watch You now’ amid the ‘shimmer, shine, and show.’ Mirrors. A disorienting existential pose surrounded by street-talk of the street-smart. Pilgrims: A Love Story draws the reader to the tough and simple sheen of language, and to its ever-questioning narrative. The old tale of ‘wait and see’ echoing once more.” — Katherine Soniat, author of A Shared Life

“Incantatory, Beitelman transmutes betrayal’s metals—its angers and devastations, its cries for vengeance and vindication—to a finer, rarer coin, marrying the apothegmatic punch of the curse to the sonnet’s synoptic concern. These are finally indispensible, unspendable reminders of poems’ powers to shape the world around them.” — Jake Adam York, author of A Murmering of Starlings

“TJ Beitelman becomes ‘Little Boy Britches // To Love’s reedy switch’ in his Thirteen Curses. These lacunae-like fragments, in their little meditations, mutter that ‘The earth is not round | But heart-shaped and broken’. It might be that upon reading this simple, honest, straightforward collection, the reader will recognize the ‘cello of our discontent’ described throughout and suddenly snap into the realization that ‘If the world were not round you would not be // on top of me.’” — C. J. Sage, author of Odyssea