Things are Happening (APR Honickman 1st Book Award)

In "Winter's Horizon" the theme of loss seeks--and finds--its own sensibilities. A boy writes a story about a father who rides off into the sunset on his riding lawnmower. The boy feels his story is full of meaning, his mother hates it, and his teacher gives it an A+. Yet the lines between fiction and fact, between father and son, and between desire and loss are only the thinnest membranes: "like an engine / steadily moving away / until it is a thin line / of reverberation / ...and its being gone / gives you a terrible sense / a terrible sense of completeness / a terrible sense that things like this / will continue to happen." --Susan Swartwout

Product Description
Poetry. Winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, this is the first book put out by the American Poetry Review. Selected and with an introduction by Gerald Stern. Five long poems tell, among other things, "my" story, the bullfighter's story, Old Watermelon Hands's story, a father's story, a son's story, your story-our stories. "What is certain is that the disappearance/of anything is dreadful, stuffed with anxiety./That the unbalanced life is far worse/than the good or bad lives./That the tragic and comic dreams/of falling and climbing/are more desirable than the dreams/of mirrors and puzzles." (from "Purple Heart Highway") Beckman's poems "fall and climb," both thematically and formally. "Joshua Beckman's line breaks: are the lines, sensations, account as if overlapping thrown forward as by a speaker who becomes breathless in the extension [of the sentence] sometimes to minute, concentrated platelets as extension by slight disparities..."-Leslie Scalapino. If you were a scientist/you would understand things differently/the macrocosmic and the microcosmic/would not blur and blend together/they would intertwine like rope (from "Winter's Horizon"), or like the lines of Joshua Beckman's poems. Luckily, Beckman is a poet and not a scientist; his ideas and images blur and blend to make us, in a poetic sense, "understand things."

"Joshua Beckman's line breaks: are the lines, sensations, account as if as if overlapping thrown fooward as by a speaker who becomes breathles in the extension [of the sentence] sometimes to minute, concentrated pltelets as extension by slight disparities." --Leslie Scalapino" Winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, this is the first book put out by the American Poetry Review. Selected and with an introduction by Gerald Stern.