Test Pattern a Fantod of Prose Poems by Carol Willette Bachofner

$19.99

 

In this new collection, Carol Bachofner forges a neoteric vision of poetry with her tongs and hammer. She calls Test Pattern a “fantod” of poems, based on a sense of  “uneasiness or unreasonableness” caused by the unfamiliarity of newness, of breaking apart to create something original. To tread the grounds of fantod, the reader must get sweaty and work those muscles. These poems are big, though they are not long poems. They are meant to stir up the status quo, even to cause trouble.

 

The prose sonnets are sometimes structured through a numbering system, much like dictionary definitions, which layers and accumulates meaning. Contemporary and vintage images blend uneasily, but cannily, on a borderland between poetry and prose, between a gritty present moment and a disquieting magic realism. In the title poem, “Test Pattern,” (the nightly sign-off of early television), the reader is encouraged to see “sleep time mandated by the National Broadcasting Company and the American Broadcasting Company, those controlling bastards.” We are born into patterns, like sonnets, which predate us, but it is up to us to break out from that domination. These are not your Grandma’s sonnets. These are sonnets for the future.

–Luanne Castle, author Kin Types

 

 

Description

Test Pattern a Fantod of Prose Poems

by Carol Willette Bachofner

$19.99, Full-length, paper

978-1-63534-497-4

2018

Carol Willette Bachofner writes in both traditional and experimental formats. Bachofner’s poems have appeared in anthologies and journals. She has published five collections of poetry, most recently Native Moons, Native Days (2012) and The Boyfriend Project (2017).She served as Poet Laureate of Rockland Maine from 2012 2016.
Her prose poems have come from an unexpected place of denial (that prose poems exist).
Be careful! she writes… when you disbelieve something, it is likely to hit you over the head to announce itself.

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