George Quasha Livres

In Ainu Dreams, poet George Quasha and buun, a Japanese artist living in America, collaborate in poetically manifesting the artist's richly articulated dream-life. These eighty-odd poems embody an ever-opening cosmos of curious image, surprising narrative, and enigmatic teaching in a language no one could have dreamed up alone. Structurally intriguing poems reveal the innards of the dreams themselves, yet always speak directly and readably, sometimes addressed to a second person (the poet? the reader?). The poems and even reading itself seem to be dreaming. Poet and dreamer both live in New York's Hudson Valley.

"Words say too much to let you know the truth.'" George Quasha's torqued, enigmatic proverbs create unlikely balances among discrepant engagements. WAKING FROM MYSELF is the sixth volume published of George Quasha's "preverbs," an invented poetic genre that's the flipside of "proverbs"--instead of giving capsules of wisdom, they awaken language to its inevitable ambiguities in the face of complex truth-telling. The vectors of these marvelous poems work at cross purposes, keeping each other aloft. If William Blake's "Proverbs of Hell' are poetry, then George Quasha's preverbs are like a close cousin. Its core question is: can poetry say the unsayable? Poetry.