{"product_id":"the-tranquilized-tongue-9780872866164","title":"The Tranquilized Tongue","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cdiv\u003eIn the tradition of French poets like Francis Ponge, Pierre Reverdy, and René Char, \u003ci\u003eThe Tranquilized Tongue\u003c\/i\u003e offers a series of prose meditations in the form of surrealist declaratives, each sentence unfolding like an alchemical riddle in which sounds, images, and figures appear, dissolve, and re-emerge to offer a glimpse of a complex unconscious roiling below the surface of everyday reality. Sometimes a paragraph, sometimes a sentence, occasionally just a fragment, each poem in\u003ci\u003e The Tranquilized Tongue\u003c\/i\u003e is a portal to new perspective on the everyday materials of reality as constituted through language itself. The postmodern classicism of language poetry meets the modernist romanticism of surrealism to startling effect in Baus''s cabinet of curiosities. The eleventh volume of the City Lights Spotlight Poetry Series, \u003ci\u003eThe Tranquilized Tongue \u003c\/i\u003eplaces Baus alongside such contemporary purveyors of the marvelous and speculative as Andrew Joron and Will Alexander.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eEric Baus\u003c\/b\u003e received an MFA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he studied with Peter Gizzi. Author of three previous poetry collections, including the prizewinning volumes \u003ci\u003eThe To Sound \u003c\/i\u003e(2004) and \u003ci\u003eThe Scared Text\u003c\/i\u003e (2011), Baus lives in Denver, Colorado, where he teaches writing and literature, works on digital audio archives of poetry, and co-edits Marcel Chapbooks.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe poems comprising \u003ci\u003eThe Tranquilized Tongue\u003c\/i\u003e propose a unique blend of Persian miniature and habanero pepper. The book is aburst with unremitting predication, each poem a merciless thought machine. —\u003cb\u003eNathaniel Mackey\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“For over a decade now, Eric Baus has been one of the leading practitioners of a new kind of poem, one that draws as equally on the legacy of surrealism, the nouveau roman, and even the language poets, as it does on the Deep Listening practice of Pauline Oliveros, Alvin Lucier’s forays into resonant sound, the films of Charles and Ray Eames, and the voiceover of Sir David Attenborough narrating our insect and animal worlds. \u003ci\u003eThe Tranquilized Tongue\u003c\/i\u003e speaks to us in a music capable of condensing geologic time into that of a microtonal interval: weird, warped, a little wobble on its newly hatched legs, this is a book where the word The will follow you like a gosling.” —\u003cb\u003eNoah Eli Gordon\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Special objects in our multiple world—from eggs to kings, from bees to caskets, from wings to statues—spawn themselves with other teeming objects in a fertile generation of aphoristic actions calmed by the clarity of prose poems framed as linked short stories. The scintillating tensions between febrile nouns, adjectival properties, and active claims all in their phonemic bliss create an elegant surrealism charged with the primary mystery of Baus’s lexicon.” —\u003cb\u003eRachel Blau DuPlessis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBeginning with the Pocket Poets Series and the publication of \u003ci\u003eHowl,\u003c\/i\u003e City Lights has played a vital role in American poetry for over 50 years. City Lights Spotlight shines a light on the wealth of innovative American poetry being written today, publishing accomplished figures known in the poetry community as well as young emerging poets, using the cultural visibility of City Lights to bring their work to a wider audience. In doing so, we also seek to draw attention to those small presses publishing such authors.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs City Lights founder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, wrote in his recent \u003ci\u003ePoetry as Insurgent Art,\u003c\/i\u003e “If you would be a poet, experiment with all manner of poetics . . . to create your own limbic, your own underlying voice, your \u003ci\u003eur\u003c\/i\u003e voice.” With City Lights Spotlight, we seek to maintain this standard of innovation and inclusiveness, publishing highly original poetry from across the cultural spectrum, and reaffirming our longstanding commitment to this most ancient and stubbornly enduring form of art.\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTrade Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"The poems comprising The Tranquilized Tongue propose a unique blend of Persian miniature and habanero pepper. The book is aburst with unremitting predication, each poem a merciless thought machine.\"--Nathaniel Mackey \"For over a decade now, Eric Baus has been one of the leading practitioners of a new kind of poem, one that draws as equally on the legacy of surrealism, the nouveau roman, and even the language poets, as it does on the Deep Listening practice of Pauline Oliveros, Alvin Lucier's forays into resonant sound, the films of Charles and Ray Eames, and the voiceover of Sir David Attenborough narrating our insect and animal worlds. The Tranquilized Tongue speaks to us in a music capable of condensing geologic time into that of a microtonal interval: weird, warped, a little wobbly on its newly-hatched legs, this is a book where the word The will follow you like a gosling.\"--Noah Eli Gordon \"Special objects in our multiple world--from eggs to kings, from bees to caskets, from wings to statues--spawn themselves with other teeming objects in a fertile generation of aphoristic actions calmed by the clarity of prose poems framed as linked short stories. The scintillating tensions between febrile nouns, adjectival properties, and active claims all in their phonemic bliss create an elegant surrealism charged with the primary mystery of Baus's lexicon.\"-Rachel Blau DuPlessis, author of Drafts \"Eric Baus has always been a seering poet, creating language that means sound as much as it means anything, creating nothing out of anything and everything and vice versa. These poems start ringing through the glass of themselves as soon as you open the book and feel like the words of a tongue that has been tranquilized and is speaking to say why. A poem like 'The Molting Mouth' reads 'The word glass. \/ The word hand. \/ The word milk. \/ The word mirror.' In these four lines we are forced to see that a glass becomes a mirror only because we command it to, that we see our own reflection in poems only because the poet is kind enough, or cares enough, to command it to.\"--Dorothea Lasky, Poetry Magazine's Harriet Blog \"Eric Baus's fourth book, is his best yet ... Made as much of matter as of sound, [the poems are] an acoustical chamber where words, sounds, letters and images are constantly emerging, intermingling, echoing, and changing into other words, sounds, letters and images ... This is a world of unpredictable and miraculous change, a world that is simultaneously philosophical and alchemical, an inseparable mixture of factual propositions and flights of fancy ... Whereas Saussure believed that linguistic signs were immaterial, Baus posits that words are living beings.\"--John Lau, Hyperallergic \"The poems in Eric Baus's stunning fourth collection are best described as studies in scale ... The reader becomes a collaborator, a co-conspirator. And it is the book's minimalist approach that makes this refreshing, and in many ways, egalitarian relationship between the artist and his audience possible. In short, The Tranquilized Tongue is as thought-provoking as it is beautifully rendered. This is a fine addition to Baus's already accomplished and innovative body of work.\"--Kristina Marie Darling, Colorado Review \"Extending his ongoing book-length exploration of the prose poem, there aren't many poets who work the abstract book-length fragment in the way that Baus does, or so well, managing an anchor of concrete sentences that somehow accumulate into something larger and far more nebulous ... Through short, dense poems, Baus manages to utilize each sentence as a single point, accumulating those points into a far larger shape, one as much created by Baus as by each reader's experience.\"--Rob McLennan, The Small Press Book Review\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTable of Contents\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCONTENTS\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Illuminated Egg\t\t        5\u003cbr\u003eThe Profane Octave\t\t\t6\u003cbr\u003eThe Abandoned Sail\t\t        7\u003cbr\u003eThe Moss Vulture\t\t\t8\u003cbr\u003eThe Injured Window\t\t        9\u003cbr\u003eThe Poisoned Voice\t\t\t10\u003cbr\u003eThe Scarlet Phoneme\t\t11\u003cbr\u003eThe Recessive Sea\t\t\t12\u003cbr\u003eThe Egg's Alias\t\t\t        13\u003cbr\u003eThe Cadaver Moth\t\t\t14\u003cbr\u003eThe Feral Film\t\t\t        15\u003cbr\u003eThe Dismantled Diorama\t\t16\u003cbr\u003eThe King's Silhouette\t\t17\u003cbr\u003eThe Séance's Ellipses\t\t18\u003cbr\u003eThe Acoustic Plumage\t\t19\u003cbr\u003eThe Molting Mouth\t\t\t20\t\u003cbr\u003eThe Corporeal Cliff\t\t\t21\u003cbr\u003eThe Arrow's Circuit\t\t\t22\u003cbr\u003eThe Plagiarized Remains\t\t23\u003cbr\u003eThe Creature's Eclipse\t\t24\u003cbr\u003eThe Centrifugal Swarm\t\t25\u003cbr\u003eThe Invisible Vowels\t\t        26\u003cbr\u003eThe Statue's Saliva\t\t\t27\u003cbr\u003eThe Alluvial Tomb\t\t\t28\u003cbr\u003eThe Prism's Nerves\t\t\t29\u003cbr\u003eThe Abscessed Sky\t\t\t30\u003cbr\u003eThe Scrambled Helix\t\t        31\u003cbr\u003eThe Dissected Breath\t\t32\u003cbr\u003eThe Corroded Blood\t\t        33\u003cbr\u003eThe Wounded Mirage\t\t34\u003cbr\u003eThe Microphone's Moan\t\t35\u003cbr\u003eThe Drone's Orbit\t\t\t36\u003cbr\u003eThe Panoramic Murmur\t\t37\u003cbr\u003eThe Posthumous Glass\t\t38\u003cbr\u003eThe Membrane's Collapse\t\t39\u003cbr\u003eThe Marionette's Casket\t\t40\u003cbr\u003eThe Retracted Hawk\t\t        41\u003cbr\u003eThe Eagle's Doubles\t\t\t42\u003cbr\u003eThe Incendiary Steam\t\t43\u003cbr\u003eThe Mirror's Spores\t\t\t44\u003cbr\u003eThe Mimetic Moon\t\t\t45\u003cbr\u003eThe Flicker's Skin\t\t\t46\u003cbr\u003eThe Eviscerated River\t\t47\u003cbr\u003eThe Inverted Urn\t\t\t48\u003cbr\u003eThe Infested Echo\t\t\t49\u003cbr\u003eThe Phonetic Projector\t\t50\u003cbr\u003eThe Devoted Cloud\t\t\t51\u003cbr\u003eThe Abducted Dictionary\t\t52\u003cbr\u003eThe Suspended Pulse\t\t53\u003cbr\u003eThe Vestigial Sentence\t\t54\u003cbr\u003eThe Amplified Tide\t\t\t55\u003cbr\u003eThe Atrophied Iris\t\t\t56\u003cbr\u003eThe Ambushed Book\t\t        57\u003cbr\u003eThe Flooded Swan\t\t\t58\u003cbr\u003eThe Demolished Flock\t\t59\u003cbr\u003eThe Crown's Cocoon\t\t        60\u003cbr\u003eThe Cobra's Pollen\t\t\t61\u003cbr\u003eThe Exposed Storm\t\t\t62\u003cbr\u003eThe Ocean's Intestines\t\t63\u003cbr\u003eThe Disguised Growl\t\t        64\u003cbr\u003eThe Exhumed Antenna \t\t65\u003cbr\u003eThe Splintered Listener\t\t66\t\t\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"City Lights Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48884895285591,"sku":"9780872866164","price":11.39,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/the-tranquilized-tongue-9780872866164","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}