Words the Interrupted Speak
Paul B. Roth
Best Country Fare
We go by different names. We stretch ourselves out across the countryside on picnic blankets, streak across turnpikes on tour buses or get easily mesmerized by the paddle's churn aft of a steamboat down a vertical river. We no longer wear masks, sweat-ringed hats or dusty bandanas. Those who recognize us and flee, flee only what they don't know. Others who do come close to touching us, say things in languages we understand but about things we can't imagine. It's clear there's no longer any fear. Voices crack into awkward smiles. Songs buried under centuries of phlegm emerge from unclear throats scraped with gravel and rock to make them sing. Children are quick to learn these old songs, repeating them in the brand new dreams of their easy sleep. Heard before, but long ago, these songs appear one after another, emptying every known person's mouth. People chewing them like horse bits kiss with them in place of lips, and later create lyrics for them until, for safe-keeping, they decide on stashing them between the spaces changing and dividing buried rock. At last an open microphone crackling from the empty podium signals it's no one's turn to speak.
Words the Interrupted Speak
Paul B. Roth
$9.00 USD
March Street Press
3413 Wilshire
Greensboro NC
marchstreetpress.com
rbixby@earthlink.net
isbn 1-59661-152-9
62pp
Paul B. Roth, author of such essential collections as Fields Below Zero, is a master of the poem en prose. In this new open sequence dedicated to the genre, he creates a landscape of upstate New York wherein each man and woman exists in a loneliness of asphalt and chill. Yet the voice of the poet, woven throughout the book, is that of a man who listens to the achingly silent fields and nights. He hears rust, frozen creeks, stone, stray fawns, and the seeds that sprout inside words; and because he is willing to stop and listen, he knows his name, daily traffic, and language are both exit and existence, a desolation he has the courage to behold in snowdrifts and in the flight of crows, letting the reader be his companion in this recuperation of language and loss in this sacramental relationship we are lucky enough to experience.
--Anthony Seidman
This book is a house with a thousand rooms, each room containing a thousand houses, each house containing a ventriloquist with a thousand voices, saying, "I want to be so much a part of this room that its windows will only open when I breathe." Words the Interrupted Speak is exquisite, incisive. It continually surprises with its diamond-tipped images and the depth of its emotions. These are poems spoken in the midst of the ultimate interruptions: our mortality and our death. Paul B. Roth speaks in "a whole new language created from spaces between the old letters.\rdblquote This book is a jewel box as big as a building. In discerning the self in relation to cultural conflict and metaphysical crises, Roth discovers the visceral and elemental. He writes, "Groping for my own face, I touch nothing but rock, earth, roots and their water.\rdblquote This book is a jewel box full of light and stone, rock and root.
--Patrick Lawler
Paul B. Roth lives in upstate New York, where he is editor and publisher of The Bitter Oleander Press. Other work of his may be found in La Jornada (Mexico), Skidrow Penthouse, Osiris, Tribeca Poetry Review, Avocet, The Aurorean, Iodine, The Deronda Review, 12x2 Anthology (France) and Salamander. This is his seventh collection of poems, the most recent being, Cadenzas by Needlelight, published by Cypress Books in 2009.