Elapsing Speedway Organism
by Bruce Covey
ISBN: 978-1-84728-314-6
Publication Date: October 2, 2006
104 pages
$15
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Listen to Bruce Covey's interview with Collin Kelley on Leisure Talk Radio Network.
Read about Bruce Covey:
Interview at Saint Elizabeth Street
Interview at The Emory Wheel
What People are Saying about Elapsing Speedway Organism:
"These poems revel in the precision of their own comic-constructed logic. It is a matter of fact that anything may turn into anything and hold, feelings encouraged to burst - "the impossibility of tidiness." I'm all for poetry that, like Covey's, wants to pull down the sky."
— Anselm Berrigan
"I admire these multi-tasking, speed of light, postmodern poems: the “deferential machinery” of their precise absurdities and comic veerings, and the surprises ignited in almost every line. Each text is wild yet exact. Pulse and synapse quickening, cerebral, dabbling in the erotics of geometry, but also cartoony, this is lip smacking word art for a hungry 21st century citizenry."
— Amy Gerstler
"Elapsing Speedway Organism affords many pleasures. It can be goofy (rhyming “gargle” with “marbles”); and it can be keen (“If the dollars don’t add up, drop your signifying”). Covey has a talent for recontextualizing the everyday, most brilliantly in his many list-poems. Popular culture, food, travel, it’s all here. And what better way to humble Romantic sublimity than this: “I want to wrap my claws around the uninterrupted sky / And pull it down around me in a puddle at my ankles.”"
— Jennifer Moxley
"Bruce Covey's delightful and willfully eccentric writing combines the giddy weightlessness of the information age with a barrage of tactile feedback. His poems are both hi-tech and low-rent, offering “14 Kung Fu Climaxes” as well as instructions that coach us to “Ride into the electric descent.” I guarantee you'll notice a shiny new angle, curious corner, or “charismatic fold” every time you open this book."
— Elaine Equi
"Covey shows himself to be a poet in charge of his materials, often coyly causing them to collide and match awkwardly with each other."
— Julia Bloch, CAB/NET 2
"Humor, though, makes these poems stand out. Covey's humor is quirky, paratactic, and interesting. He throws in lines that seem to come from nowhere, like "If your socks wear out, try my yellow ones" or "Is Hart Crane a style of kung fu?" The lines come at us sideways, so we have to step back and see what's happening."
— William Allegrezza at Galatea Resurrects, read entire review here
"Elapsing Speedway Organism is aswirl with things & people. It's poppy & busy. There are crowds. Tourists, often. (Americans in otherwhere mirrors.) Attractions (in multiple senses). Everyday objects rendered in cartoony strokes, somehow miniaturized, & all giving off beeps & waves. (We're to tune in, find the frequency & pick up each clear-singing poem.) Idioms, superstitions, fortunes (as in cookies), forecasts, gaming odds, instructions, percentages of chance, flight numbers, the facts & wishes that electrify a life, marking or tweaking it as it goes speeding along."
— Shanna Compton, read entire review here
"ESO, not to be confused w/ ELO, is the kind of poetry book that reminds you that the New York School style still has a reason to be pursued. And I don’t mean the John Ashbery by way of James Tate elliptical mess that young MFA’d poets produce because they don’t want to take the time to edit, but rather the “poem showing its structure on its sleeve” style of Kenneth Koch or early Ron Padgett."
— Dustin Williamson
Elapsing Speedway Organism
Revolved to require to reverse, hip at the apex of triangle
All web to funnel, to spin around & under circumference
To advocate the many that drop, pennies fluttering through oil
& wet behind the ears, green. Meant stripes as favor
Curved at the top & lips. All the skins peel with it,
Sheets & sheets of mail drawn between nails
& all the characters therein, leaving only subtext
Rebar & organ, shadow intention. Sliding then your finger
Between them to create artificial distinctions
Where each now thirsts for other, water 2 water &
Vessel 2 vessel, pattern only dangling ones
From line by loop & hook, trying to herd you there
To juicier grass, to release & let screw momentum
Carry you into the future, where cement just ooze
& outline the single spot in the middle, the one
that all animals jingle around ride them
