Charles Bernstein is our postmodern jester of American poesy, equal part surveyor of democratic vistas and scholar of avant-garde sensibilities. In a career spanning thirty-five years and forty books, he has challenged and provoked us with writing that is decidedly unafraid of the tensions between ordinary and poetic language, and between everyday life and its adversaries. Attack of the Difficult Poems , his latest collection of essays, gathers some of his most memorably irreverent work while addressing seriously and comprehensively the state of contemporary humanities, the teaching of unconventional forms, fresh approaches to translation, the history of language media, and the connections between poetry and visual art. Applying an array of essayistic styles, Attack of the Difficult Poems ardently engages with the promise of its title. Bernstein introduces his key theme of the difficulty of poems and defends, often in comedic ways, not just difficult poetry but poetry itself. Bernstein never loses his ingenious ability to argue or his consummate attention to detail. Along the way, he offers a wide-ranging critique of literature’s place in the academy, taking on the vexed role of innovation and approaching it from the perspective of both teacher and practitioner. From blues artists to Tin Pan Alley song lyricists to Second Wave modernist poets, The Attack of the Difficult Poems sounds both a battle cry and a lament for the task of the language maker and the fate of invention.

""Topsy-Turvy" is Charles Bernstein's most capaciously unruly collection to date, gathering disparate poems, both tiny and grand, that speak directly to our time of "covidity," as he calls it one of the book's most poignantly disarming works. He charts in equal measure the turbulence of both the body politic and the individual. Novel and traditional forms jostle against one another: horoscopes, shanties, and elegies rub up against gags, pastorals, and feints; homophonic translations, songs, screenplays, and slapstick tangle deftly with commentaries, conundrums, psalms, and prayers. There is even an ode to the New York subway and a memorial for Harpers Ferry hero Shields Green, along with collaborations with artists Amy Sillman and Richard Tuttle. "Topsy-Turvy" is also full of other voices: Pessoa, Geeshie Wiley, Rückert, and Rimbaud; and Drummond, Virgil, Ferneyhough, and Caudio Amberian; and even an imaginary first-century aphorist. Bernstein's "cognitive dissidence" is a lyrically explosive mix of pathos, comedy, and wit, though the reader is kept guessing which is which at almost every turn. Bernstein didn't set out to write a book about the pandemic, but these poems, performances, and translations are oddly prescient, marking a path through dark times with a politically engaged form of aesthetic resistance"--

After 9/11, postmodernism and irony were declared dead. Charles Bernstein here proves them alive and well in poems elegiac, defiant, and resilient to the point of approaching song. Heir to the democratic and poetic sensibilities of Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, Bernstein has always crafted verse that responds to its historical moment, but no previous collection of his poems so specifically addresses the events of its time as Girly Man, whichfeatures works written on the evening of September 11, 2001, and in response to the war in Iraq. Here, Bernstein speaks out, combining self-deprecating humor with incisive philosophical and political thinking. Composed of works of very different forms and moods—etchings from moments of acute crisis, comic excursions, formal excavations, confrontations with the cultural illogics of contemporary political consciousness—the poems work as an ensemble, each part contributing something necessary to an unrealizable and unrepresentable whole. Indeed, representation—and related claims to truth and moral certainty—is an active concern throughout the book. The poems of Girly Man may be oblique, satiric, or elusive, but their sense is emphatic. Indeed, Bernstein’s poetry performsits ideas so that they can be experienced as well as understood. A passionate defense of contingency, resistance, and multiplicity, Girly Man is a provocative and aesthetically challenging collection of radical verse from one of America’s most controversial poets.

Bernstein, a leading voice in American literary theory, writes an irreverent guide to modernist and contemporary poetics

Poetry. " As the book's title implies, ISLETS/IRRITATIONS is frustrated with personal isolation-but also irritated with 'eyelets,' or any tight limits imposed from the outside. Bernstein attempts to create an inclusive and universal space by transcribing the transpersonal and instantaneous chunks of matter. that surround us in contemporary human society every day. A remarkable and demanding poet, associated with a tendency that may be the foundation for a major change in the way we write and read poetry"-Kenneth Funsten, Los Angeles Times Book Review.