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Rhode Island Notebook


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Not since On the Road has a book been more thoroughly of the road. Unlike Kerouac's novel, however, this book was literally written on the road in Gudding's own car, on pad and paper while driving. Rhode Island Notebook is the handwritten account of one driver's journey to happiness in the face of grief. This book-length poem chronicles the break-up of a family and the separation of a father and daughter, while at the same time recording the rise of jingoism in the United States in the moments before and during the invasion of Iraq.

Details

ISBN-10 1564784797
ISBN-13 9781564784797
Publication Date Nov 2007
Nb of pages 436

Excerpt

Notebook Made While Driving 18 Hours from Illinois to Rhode Island, Labor Day Weekend 2002, in One Go, Stopping to Gas Only and to Urinate My Pee

Departing after teaching English 247, 2:30 PM, bright sky, HWY 74 east.

Those poor raccoons.

From that rock song I learned “every rose has its thorns.”

The Ford Expedition is an abomination. Great day teaching at ISU today except for the one kid hunched at his desk: the sand-dollars of sleep hanging under his eyes kept clacking in the small breezes of his mouth weather. I woke him and explained that eye-sleep constitutes a type of guano.
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Reviews

Press Reviews

Cultural Society
Rhode Island Notebook is an act of kindness – to his daughter, to himself, even to poetry.

Stride Magazine
...this book is one of the best works of poetry I have seen for many years.

The Poetry Foundation
Gudding has hit upon the essence of the poet's notebook: a poet keeps it by his side just in case a solitary word or phrase, darting through the mind today with nothing in its train, may turn out to be just what one needs to properly understand tomorrow.

Boston Review
In a crowded field, Gudding's work demands attention.



Quotations

Rhode Island Notebook is a modern/postmodern epic as a poem-including-everything. An incredibly human(e) book at bottom, it is also Gudding’s road of excess, as Blake once had it, leading him (and us) to the palace of wisdom.
-Jerome Rothenberg

This is a remarkably vulnerable book, a dapple-drawn vortex sutra, a contemporary odyssey, an anti-Baudrillardic-bardic remapping of America. It is a meditation on loss and fecundity, an amazing read, a necessary read, by an amazing poet . . . This is the first 21st-century classic.
-Alan Sondheim

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Countries : United States of America
Genres : Poetry


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