Weather's Feather

Post-modern American Poetry, 108 pp. "Mitch Corber, a stalwart member & chronicler of NYC's poetry community for decades, explores/reveals in this his first major volume of work 'veiled moons,' 'creaky cabinets,' 'weekend binges' & so much more -- with dark, humorous, romantic & experimental, at times cut-up/random-seeming verses infused with internal rhyme & wordplay connecting the commonplace with the metaphysical through meditative 'sporadic nibbling' & 'a mosaic of moods.'" —Steve Dalachinsky "Poet Mitch Corber's 'Weather's Feather' is "raw testimony" to love, desire, loss and rage that exists within "the sum of forgiveness." A steadfast and creative presence in New York's downtown poetry scene, Mitch Corber knows the mercurial intensities of its liaisons and its allures. Its passions are his: 'Gentle me a symmetry of delayed/desire lit by a clientele of electricity.' Workdays become occasions where 'fond flowers fish for a wish,' and the whims of climate and ardor are enhanced by 'shy resurfacings.'" —Star Black "Mitch Corber is a Dylan Thomas for the Hip Hop generation. 'I lace words' is his throwdown, and he ain't kidding around. "Weather's Feather" is a unique contribution to post-Beat poetry as Corber is tapping into the experimental poetics of The Beats as found in Kerouac's 'Old Angel Midnight,' Ray Bremser's bop prosody, Burroughs' cut-up experiments and Corso's 'Gasoline.' I'll toast this new volume with the author's favorite drink: 'a sinkful of gladdened magnets.'" —Joel Lewis "Mitch Corber dances on a poetic highwire gleaning meaning from the verbal swarm that envelops us. Brawn and beauty mix it up in balletic bouquets of "seething" syntax fusions. Sinuous verse pulses with mystery and affirmation, aspiration and defeat. Beguiling and edgy, Corber's voice is authentic, complex and heady, like a grandy brandy that's been aged in a hollowed-out dictionary. Between sparkling bon mots and startling juxtapositions, Mitch seeks and finds the fine line where the personal meets the communal. —Jeffrey Cyphers Wright "Corber was introduced to poetry through nursery rhymes. He took off from there and never looked back. His flights of fancy display love, loneliness, impermanence, the joys of imagination, and unexpected ascents and descents. No one ever knows where one of his poems will land. And no two trips are alike. This is a book for worldly travelers who never tighten their seatbelts." —George Spencer "Mitch Corber, grassroots documentarian of East Village poetry scene for decades, here shows that his vérité eye goes bongo gonzo when flipped into his interior abyss. He asks, 'Have you seen my pesky porcupine,/her spiny tingle, those naughty needles?' and while everybody else might just say Noooo, for Mitch it’s an everyday experience. What’s in those needles? Surrealist syringes, jazz bops and verbal nonstops…! Teddy B (Berrigan) puts in an appearance (on Avenue C) — he is La Bohème, with Corber strutting like Lord Buckley to get hiperama. His are the Beatles of 'The Eggman.' Take two poems and call him in the morning. Name a poem 'Pyrex Bowl.' Don't take an answer for an answer. Goo goo ga-joob. Mitch Corber is the Mad Taxidermist, and language is his prey.—Bob Holman "Mitch Corber comes to us from out of nowhere, yet very much from out of somewhere. He can write love 'in the proxy of praxis'— where lovemaking is akin to poesis. A sensitive ear to assonance and rhyme, and love of the unsettling word, fuels Corber’s lyric metric. He does not so much explore as navigate. He seems to dwell in the metaphysic, rather than the street, though his sense of human, and particularly romantic, relation is vivid. His metaphysic is a valuable tool for living, existing as it must in what he terms 'the lethal diamond dream.'" —Vincent Katz

Mitch Corber is a New York City poet, a wordplay artist, who has been writing and performing his work since the early 1980’s. A New York Foundation for the Arts fellow, he is creator-director-videographer of cable TV’s long-running weekly series Poetry Thin Air and the founder of the extensive streaming Thin Air Poetry DVD Archive, thinairvideo.com. Studying poets he’s documented on video has contributed to his evolving style as a writer. Mitch is a founding member of the innovative multimedia art collective, Colab (Collaborative Projects).