Radio at Night
by Laurie Price.
Pub date: 2013
ISBN: 9780984607655
114pp. Design by Julie Harrison.
Cover art by Laurie Price.
Price: $15.00.
"For someone who loves to listen to radio at night, it is a great & magic pleasure to follow Laurie Price’s “secret longitude” through a syntax all her own driving through nomadic folds cathexing Second Avenue to Essaouira & words to images where the circumstances are always “another other,” providing "a theory of reality the mind can’t frame,” because this is a poem & thus unframable, but always open on the night & the day to come."
-Pierre Joris
"Radio at night escalates with all its parts to haunt received categories of logic. We travel to an "expansion chamber" coincident with the visions, a place where physics and physical senses jump domains..."
-Jack Kimball
"...Now, if you're a San Francisco poet, when you read Radio at Night, probably you'll think of
Jack Spicer, because of that radio. But it's a different presence here—not
poet as radio, (although Laurie certainly works in tune with an Outside)--but
more like a radio motif, sometimes explicit (“the rich could find their radios
here” or Sam the Sham & the Pharaoh's song “Wooly Bully” of 1965, or in a
Moroccan shop a radio with no sound but with blue light and power) and
sometimes suggested via details of broadcast, voice, musical instrument,
frequency, or disembodied communication. The title poem is in New York, and
here too, the radio emits light instead of sound...Each place in the book is
prefaced with a photograph of a local door—opaque or transparent, solid or
gated or windowed, brick or iron or glass—come into this country, or don't, or
can you? Do you want to? She carries a liquid suitcase. New York is a country,
alongside Mexico or Morocco, but never the U.S. The U.S. is not a
country; many nations aren't."