The Green Ray

Author: Corina Copp

Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse (2015)

The Green Ray is relentless—in its syntactical and almost kaleidoscopic subversion of univocal emotion, its contrapuntal speed and delay, intimacy and pretense, security of sources and formal promiscuity. The poems both sense and want to, enacting a rigorous aesthetic engagement that never quite achieves synthesis, instead posing writing itself as dialogic longing. It is Corina Copp's first full-length collection of poems.

"Brand names and their attendant ®s might be sprinkled throughout The Green Ray, yet, except for these registered trademarks, this exquisitely dissociative book seems free of any utterance previously registered in English. Copp’s liminal language—unmoored from identifiable references, its syntax and articulations torqued to the point of estrangement—asserts, above all, her material’s plasticity and unfixity. Its effect is such that straight talk rings deadeningly ordinary. May promo be a case in point. The Green Ray is gloriously unblurbable."

–Mónica de la Torre

"What is this postindustrial flume of a poetic line, radiant with French-film gift-packs, recidivist vocabulary, heart on spin art? I don't know, but everybody will be imitating it next year, and I'm in love with the whole damn hadron accelerator."

–Catherine Wagner