Transversales

Poetry. "The poems in Michael Gessner's new collection, TRANSVERSALES, are formally dazzling incisive, witty, and smart but compassion tempers linguistic brilliance. In a series set in Paris, for instance, a visit (against advice) to the "labyrinth of tented markets," the now-dangerous Market of Seine-Saint-Denis, is punctuated dramatically by fragmented quotations from Victor Hugo's diary kept during the siege of Paris (1871). Quite simply, I am hooked on this book. Gessner's poems are glory." Cynthia Hogue

"There's music of the mind in Michael Gessner's TRANSVERSALES, the investigating intelligence and haunting observations of a flaneur out of Walter Benjamin whose path time travels and intersects the lines of other alienated realities. A deft mastery marks these poems. 'The Markets of Seine-Saint-Denis' is a kind of tour de force; a trip to the 'home of the homeless' where both the past and the present 'are eating the unknown.' I am haunted by his imagery, as when he evokes the rain as 'the patterings of an unknown companion, lost and distant, now returned to wrap this house in sheets of itself.' I am struck by his poetic intelligence, as his lines intersect us with a sense of a beingness that is everywhere 'political, which means the beast is in costume.'" Rebecca Seiferle"