Algorithms - Softcover

Allman Ph.D., John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1935835084 ISBN 13: 9781935835080

Publisher: Quale Press LLC, 2012

Synopsis

John Allman's prose poems in Algorithms go forth in a kind of wanderjahr to discover or be discovered. These prose poems possess a different kind of urgency, a vitality that almost defies boundaries, a freedom to span discourses and leap across vocabularies. Allman is free to follow his mindful wanderings, landing us in Croatia in 1991, navigating with Columbus in 1492, witnessing a drug bust, watching his wife's root canal, and examining the frozen remains of princess in Siberia. At the same time, the notion of an algorithm, the idea that, given a certain origin, a thing in process must become x or y, provides a way of understanding that each poem encompasses a fate, destined to become only itself-in essence, that boundaries are inherent in being. Ultimately, this points to Allman's unresolved conundrum: the desire to be something beyond one's self, but one can never escape one's own being, and its limits-for what then would I and Not-I be?

About this title

About the Author

John Allman taught at Cazenovia College in Central New York State and, for 26 years, at Rockland Community College of the State University of New York. He is retired and lives in Katonah, New York, with his wife, Eileen Allman, also a writer. His awards include the Helen Bulls Prize from Poetry Northwest and a Pushcart Poetry Prize; he was twice awarded National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships in Poetry. He is the author of many collections of poetry and is also the author of a collection of fiction.

Edition details

• Publisher: Quale Press LLC
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1935835084
• ISBN 13: 9781935835080
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 67