Primitive State

Author: Anselm Berrigan

Publisher: Edge Books (2015)

Primitive State is a book-length tour-de-force from one of contemporary poetry's strongest search-lights. Composed as an homage to the list poem as "a catalog of consciousness-beats," the result is a long poem peculiarly perfect for twitter. Written across the fall and winter of 2008-09, Primitive State is a continuous arrangement of deadpan observations, a comic reboot of the poet's writing mind, and partial portrait of the poet's then one year-old daughter. Primitive State is a work simultaneously spontaneous and exact, at once open-ended and satisfyingly immediate.