January 2008

About the Book:

Collects 135 poems, written shortly after the death of Landis Everson.

– Published: April, 2010 (149 pp., paper)
– ISBN: 978-0-615-34305-1
– 5 x 8

Praise:

“Like fragments of old photographs happened on in a drawer, Ben Mazer’s poems tap enigmatic bits of the past that suddenly come to life again. To read him is to follow him along a dreamlike corridor where everything is beautiful and nothing is as it seems.” — John Ashbery, author of Planisphere

“A surge of poems in the aftermath of a friend’s sudden death, recalling Emily Dickinson’s ‘After great sadness a formal feeling comes.’ And indeed the formality here is in the nature of a deliverance. Not so easy: the echoes rage and multiply, rhymes (better/ water/ patter) knock about and sometimes screech, big-time history pales or looks cheap compared to simpler intimacies — and sometimes a moon-like ‘she’ appears to cast much-needed receptivity every which way. The poems are all necessity, ‘a frozen crystal spectrum magnified,’ a procession.” — Bill Berkson, author of Portrait and Dream

“Ben Mazer’s January 2008 reads like pages ripped from an ingenious madman’s most personal journal, like love letters never sent — in other words like unbridled passion penned in the flame of a moment and not meant for any eyes but the writer’s own. Here intense confessional lines seduce us into a universe of surreal grotesque, where satin monkeys keep company alongside Frankenstein and movie stars from the golden age of cinema appear nonchalantly alongside Dante’s Beatrice in Mazer’s testament to love, loss, and most importantly, to poetry.” — Katy Henriksen, publisher of Cannibal Books

“Highly explosive. Radioactive material. The richest work of American poetry so far this century.” — Stephen Sturgeon, editor of Fulcrum

Reviews:

– “Mazer can clearly do it, can write accessible poems of heft and beauty—to say nothing of the fact that he can actually come out with two books simultaneously, and that he’s got the guts to come out with a book of, essentially, grief and love (it’d be interesting to read January 2008 up next to Anne Carson’s recent and stunning NOX)—for this we should all, any of us interested in language and poetry, be glad.” — Weston Cutter, The Rumpus

– “There are poems of grief, goofiness, courtly love, sexual obsession, and friendship. Mazer is willing to leave himself astonishingly vulnerable, and in his vulnerability he has written some remarkably generous poems . . .” — Patrick Morrissey, Harp & Altar

– “Beauty, humor, intellect, loss: in January 2008 Mazer gathers these disparate aspects to find a point of intersect. It’s a remarkable book, and a testament to the depth of friendship…” — Daniel Pritchard, The Wooden Spoon

– “Ben Mazer’s poems find aesthetic unity by arranging their emotional resonances in the themes and variations of the musical phrase, giving both voice and silence to the personal experiences that evade language… Mazer’s layering of details, coupled with a tautness of form that is carefully governed by an exceptional musical ear places him among the most dynamic and original poets of his generation.” — Christopher Bock, Jacket Magazine

When the wind has had enough it bangs
against the shutters, knocks the windowsill
of all your prowess lately where it hangs
in the low atmosphere for good or ill.
And all your words, your poems burst in the rain
wanting return, to open up the door
thence which they flew through first excluding pain
and now which stand and borrow from no more.
Your lines live in my eyes, in my handshake
that holds dissolving shadows of your time
as perfect prospects, foretold for the sake
of larger larks all turning on a whim.
The rain is roaring, but it is a fake
and all your hopes go turning on a dime.