Andrew Joron was born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1955 and grew up in Stuttgart Germany; Lowell, Massachusetts; and Missoula, Montana. He attended the University of California at Berkeley, where he majored in history and philosophy of science. After a decade and a half spent writing science-fiction poetry, culminating in his volume Science Fiction (Pantograph Press, 1992), he turned to a more philosophical mode of speculative lyric. This work has been collected in The Removes (Hard Press, 1999) and in Fathom (Black Square Editions, 2003). He is also the translator, from the German, of the Marxist-Utopian philosopher Ernst Bloch’s Literary Essays (Stanford University Press, 1998), and of the surrealist Richard Anders’s aphorisms and prose poems. Andrew Joron lives in Berkeley, where he works as a freelance bibliographer and indexer.
Here Andrew Joron, "the metaphysician-elect of contemporary American poetry" (Calvin Bedient) and author of The Removes and Fathom, ranges through literature, science, and philosophy as he maps a poetics, and gripping poetic ontology. Confronting postmodern skepticism, Joron begins from the premise that poets are "chained to the impossible," and that the poetic "cry" exceeds specific social crises. Joron teaches us that more than ever before there is a distinct and obvious place for the unsayable, the abyssal, in our poetic practice. With unmatched lucidity and compassion, Joron's prose works, interwoven here with a series of soaringly lyrical prose poems, are indispensable in our attempts to embrace a creative space that encompasses human experience.
