Splitting The Difference - Softcover

Ovitt, George

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0988619148 ISBN 13: 9780988619142

Publisher: Big Table Publishing Company, 2013

George Ovitt’s poems smell like Earth to me–rich, desolate, crowded, pungent, delicate, bitter, sweet, solid. They work the space between a man standing on a platform waiting for a train and another sleeping in a cardboard bed under the tracks. A musician gives a kid a guitar lesson, a driller says a hundred feet to drill for water is the same in town as on a mountain top–we live in the same world, the man under the tracks suggests with a wave. We walk into a hardware store where things fit and leave the world “where nothing is measured or level.” But these poems never really leave the unmeasured world. Instead they split the difference, leaving the reader with a sense of what is truly beautiful. ~ Brady Peterson, Glued to the Earth and Between Stations My appreciation for poetry has been significantly enhanced after reading George Ovitt’s richly compelling collection, Splitting the Difference. From the pleasure we men derive from browsing a hardware store, to the cheerful homeless man who seems somehow to recognize that we are “all living in the same world,” this wonderful work spoke to me as few have. That Ovitt is not already a declared national treasure is confounding. His new collection surely will move him in that coveted direction. ~ Michael C. Keith, And Through the Trembling Air Line by line, Splitting the Difference will unhinge you from any delusions about the stability of life. These are poems about the complexity of time–the slow-burning violence of a summer day in the desert, the silent hours of an insomniac’s suffering, the moment of demolition of a house holding eight generations of memories to be leveled to rubble–and through those disarticulations of linearity and positivism, the poems materialize an almost supernatural, spectral music. It haunts the present with a dark cacophony of deceptively gentle rhythms that will inundate your body with competing temporalities and expose “the empty place in us–that vast unknown inner space / (that) needs filling.” So if you’re brave enough, buy this book and dare to trace “what’s left when / there’s nothing left.” ~Seith Michelson, Eyes Like Broken Windows

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