Publisher's Synopsis
Praise for "Try Me" by Niel Rosenthalis: 'Not just insight, but the strange detours consciousness must take to know itself--"I'm interested in the edge/I strive, toward;" not just desire, but the strange ways it flashes in and out of time; there's no one writing quite like Rosenthalis. "Buscando ser más," said Paulo Freire, and this is poetry that demands more, from experience, the self, the poem itself. Then there's the rueful elegance: "the decade was lit from behind"; "let me capitulate, O eyeless flies..." A deep sense of responsibility to the art shines through experiment and erasure. Try Me is an extraordinary debut.' -D. Nurkse, author of A Night in Brooklyn (Knopf) // 'Niel Rosenthalis's Try Me is both a dare and a plea, as well as a meditation on time as it relates to questions of the body, sex, desire, and love, not as hierarchy, but in every thrilling combination and order. Rosenthalis blends the lyric with the conceptual both to get at "the specific, not the small," and as a kind of balm or "heal-over of cruelty." "I am a genius," he writes, "I want to show the world true feeling," and he does. Rosenthalis's love poems wear philosophical masks, while his logic and its aesthetics fulfill the imperative of the title to "turn tomorrow on."' -Marni Ludwig, author of Pinwheel (New Issues Poetry & Prose)
