The Man Who Sleeps in My Office

By Jason Sommer

Book Overview

With grace and style, Jason Sommer considers how to live in the wake of history among those who are indelibly marked by it. On the surface a book of poems composed in the shadow of the Holocaust, The... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226768058
• ISBN13: 9780226768052
• Release Date: April 2004
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 71 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.9" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

On beautiful borderlands of past, ever-present, and imagined

Whether describing a dog that's only existed hypothetically or an aged couple's real and vividly painful return to the ruins of war, Jason Sommer uses the sharpened tools of an exacting poet to whittle blunt giants such as memory, love, or regret into pointed, particular moments. This collection, his third, flourishes in the static between the all-too-real and the marginally believable. The title poem explains how a friendly intruder is surely to blame for all the barely-misplaced papers and slightly adjusted objects in an office, while another follows a man arriving late, and by himself, to an art house screening, and the layers of intersecting story and realities that can accompany such a meeting of life and art. Never quite pure narrative or abstraction, the circumstances and moments visited in "The Man Who Sleeps In My Office" are too skillfully rendered and precise to be doubted as anything but the work of a great poet, while staying too tied to the meaningful and varied details and relationships of the world, if even the hypothetical canine's world, to be considered anything but real.