Arrive On Wave: Collected Poems, by Gil Ott

Description

Arrive on Wave: Collected Poems, by Gil Ott, edited by Trace Peterson, Gregory Laynor, & Eli Goldblatt

Foreword by Eli Goldblatt
Introduction by Trace Peterson
Afterword by Charles Alexander

ISBN 9780925904911

Poetry: 330 pages

2016

Alas, here are poems that serve as evidence we had among us a spirit of a man whose fertile generosity was not limited to his literary and arts activism, but very much the warp and woof of his art and intellect. Gil Ott’s poetry aims to disintegrate powers of meaning while simultaneously presages radical possibilities of thought and speech which reflect the full-range of his restorative vision.

— Major Jackson

Gil Ott has always been this gigantic presence in poetry to me.  For a while I thought maybe it was because he was one of the first real poets I met as a teenager.  But it is actually because he is a real poet, an absolute poet, always kept in the present tense no matter how far away his body we knew has become.  To garner and sustain the favor of the Muse is a skill apparent in this extraordinary book.  If you believe in the strength of poetry, in poems as heat-seeking missiles capable of intercepting a bleak disregard for life then here is a gigantic poetry to smother the worst!

— CAConrad