Collapsing Outside the Box

By: George Korolog

It is easy to get lost in the psychic geography of George Korolog's poems. These are the dynamic and wondrous locations where readers long to vanish. Each poem is its own inimitable territory. Whether you are testing the minefield of the collection's tender and agonizing opening poem, "Our Adoption", or feeling along the cool, storied grotto of "Ticket to a French Exhibition for the Blind", one is always delectably aware of location and emotion. In the midst of his landscapes, one will feel at times heartened or haunted, but always inexorably, nakedly human and hungry for the next poem. George Korolog's work is bold, witty and intensely sensual. One will want to prolong the delightfully harrowing journey. Collapsing Outside the Box teaches us how to live in any terrain with only a flashlight and a compass. Alicia Fisher, author of Tenants There is a meditative luminosity in George Korolog's long lines and a sincerely brutal tenderness in his shorter, sharper verses. We are allowed almost painful glimpses inward as stanzas open and prove incautious in their nudity. Collapsing Outside the Box allows us to feel our own tenuous walls shimmer and dissipate. We are "stripped of doubt" and learn to trust this new voice as he walks near us, never quite touching our elbow, always whispering in our ears how "all explanation is retrospective." George Korolog's collection is brave and peppered with a sense of reach that we recognize as his own tendency to instruct, to guide, but also that reach which is solely ours-- the wish to hold onto his lovely words, to stay within these pages just a bit longer. -Kelli Allen, author of the Pulitzer nominated Otherwise, Soft White Ash In Collapsing Outside the Box, George Korolog's first book of poetry, we confront the violent streets of a youth in which PVC pipe serves as a child's primary means of self-defense, whitewashed hospital hallways that reflect the brutal inevitability of a father's open heart surgery; baseball, out of nowhere, refreshingly, baseball; and an insistent, believable voice that emphasizes, even when it forgets particular details, the importance of memory. Capable of making his reader laugh, cry, smile, and dance nostalgically with him, Korolog's poetry accomplishes in this initial effort what many writers' work never will: a consistent, authentically confessional lyric that is both wise and empathetic, sweet and tough, memorable even in the specific details it attempts to erase, critique, change, or improve. His is work I applaud for its candor, accessibility, and--perhaps most importantly--strangeness. Often deceptive in its break and abrupt in its cadence, Korolog's line is highly regenerative and intentionally meandering, which allows him to enter and exit a variety of perspectives at will. Collapsing Outside the Box is a solid debut that--at its most intricate, well-crafted moments--coheres out of many fragments, all the while arguing for a poetry that, once gifted, is hard not to receive. J. Scott Brownlee Poet, Critic, Editor-at-LargeWriters in the Public Schools Fellow, New York University

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 061572745X
• ISBN13: 9780615727455
• Release Date: November 2012
• Publisher: Aldrich Press
• Length: 54 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.1" x 6.0"