Sunny Wednesday
Often breathtaking ... this latest collection from Kocot intersperses frantic images with hauntingly simple and loss-laden outcries. Throughout, there is the poet's thwarted longing for an understanding that cannot come: "all poets and poetry elude me,/ especially myself and my own"; Kocot's speaker--a voice simultaneously adorable, helpless and deeply brave--is both obsessed with and frustrated by process: "See, in a poem, things actually/ have to be doing things,/ not just floating around." ... Kocot's most lucid moments achieve a kind of visionary clarity ("The waters are very simple today./ Hospital blue, in error of twilight"), a beautiful refusal to accept the inevitable ("Listen, I said it before, die/ and come back as fire") and inklings of the kind of loss that could yield such a powerful, almost overflowing book: "I wait to go to you,/ smoking and breaking curses under/ the Jackson Pollock fuck you moon." --Publishers Weekly
Noelle Kocot is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently, The Bigger World (Wave Books, 2011), and a book of translations of poems by Tristan Corbière, Poet by Default (Wave Books, 2011). Her previous works include the discography Damon's Room (Wave Books Pamphlet Series, 2010), Sunny Wednesday (Wave Books, 2009) and Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems (Wave Books, 2006). She is also the author of 4 and The Raving Fortune (both from Four Way Books). Her poems were included in the Best American Poetry anthologies for 2001, 2012, and 2013, as well as in the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry edited by Paul Hoover. She is the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, The Fund for Poetry and the American Poetry Review, as well as a residency fellowship from Lannan Foundation. She currently lives in New Jersey.
