Severance Songs

About the Author

Joshua Corey graduated from Vassar College in 1993 and earned an M.A. in English literature and an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Montana. He was awarded a Stegner Fellowship in creative writing from Stanford University in 1999, and received his Ph.D. in English from Cornell University in 2007. He is the author of Selah (Barrow Street, 2003), Fourier Series (Spineless Books, 2005), and two chapbooks. He teaches at Lake Forest College in Illinois.

Advanced Praise

Joshua Corey’s book of sonnets is formally playful and emotionally raw, with an intensity of expression that is at times harrowing….[A]n extraordinary volume. —Paul Hoover

These songs shuttle between a past and a future, cast adrift or severed from a violent, ashen present into a necessary untimeliness…. What then of the sonnet, repository of desire and enemy of time? It is, as ever, that form by which we re-imagine subjectivity to confro t altered circumstances, and to assess ‘the shipwreck of the singular’ in the maelstrom of the many…. —Michael Palmer, from “On Joshua Corey” in Conjunctions

Beyond pastoral—or perhaps in keeping with the tensions by which pastoral is generated—Severance Songs is also a specimen of that other thoroughly outdated and suspect mode, serial love poetry (in this case addressed to the poet’s future wife). It is a work of improvised yet layered experimentalism, commendable both for its deep engagement with the thorny philosophical problems of writing pastoral in the 21st century and for the smart, sensual verve of its verse-craft. — Stephen Ross, Wave Composition

Corey’s Severance Songs reinterprets the sonnet form. What is a sonnet in the world of Severance Songs? A poem of fourteen lines, a meditation or prayer, a flash of ether fitted with internal and feminine rhymes. There were moments of grandeur, and importantly, fealty to the art of poetry and print culture. — Lindsay Illich, Cactus Song

[Corey’s] poems are sonnet-like less for their containers than for the bright shapes they contain. The sense of a sonnet, these poems suggest, isn’t in formal configuration but in a manner of speaking, of talking to oneself, of talking things through. In Severance Songs, this manner reels through landscape to render the ‘pool of newsworthy airs’ that ‘surrounds my perception.’ —Zach Savich, Poetry Northwest

In terms of lineation and the lack of recognizable rhyme schemes and rhythmic patterns, these fourteen-liners are unlike traditional sonnets, but almost each one of them is rich with allusion to the English and American literary canons —Nora Delaney, The Critical Flame

Format:  Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-932195-92-7