Durable Goods

By James Pollock

Durable Goods is a book of a sharply imagined poems about everyday technology. Writing in the Dinggedicht or thing-poem tradition of poets like Rilke, Ponge, and Marianne Moore, James Pollock calls to surprising life everything from microwaves to kettles, sprinklers to umbrellas, with a precision both unerring and effortless. By conjuring the essential spirit of each object, the poet reveals the tools and appliances that surround us as both sympathetic reflections of ourselves--our fear, love, rage, hope, and grief--and strange beings with inner lives of their own. "It knows how much pressure you've been under," Pollock writes, of the barometer, "that you could use a change of atmosphere." Read together, these poems immerse us in an imagined world with the power to make us see our own in a new way. Suffused with dazzling wordplay, razor wit, and rippling sonic effects, the poems richly reward being read aloud. Indeed, for Pollock, the most durable good is language itself.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1550656104
• ISBN13: 9781550656107
• Release Date: March 2023
• Publisher: Signal Editions
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 0.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 4.8" x 7.3"