Jon Curley Reviews Anselm Berrigan's Come in Alone

In his aptly titled review "A Square Deal," Jon Curley guides readers through the experience of reading Anselm Berrigan's newest collection of poems, Come in Alone.

The formal inventiveness of this new volume by Anselm Berrigan is satisfying and maddening. The latter reaction, as it turns out, is a satisfying one in relation to this work and many challenging works of art on and off the page. To clarify: Come In Alone challenges the prim verticality of the page when formatting lines with a compositional field pared into descending, rectilinear parts without much variation in shape. Does Berrigan adopt an anarchic, sprawling pattern for these poems, spilling and splaying lines and phrases here and there? Oh, no—even more jarringly, these poems resemble perfect squares at the perimeter of the page. This recognizable construction, however, winds up conferring even wilder aesthetic, discursive, and intellectual implications and enactments, offering multiple potential readings.

Even if Berrigan didn’t opt for this particular format, his lines reveal the proverbial heresy of being paraphrased and resist being quoted extensively, without mutilating his meaning(s) or undercutting his method. I shall quote very sparingly in light of the potential risk of mis-rendering what is stated, suggested, and/or diversely inferred. Because the experiential weirdness of reading this book is so bracing, let me give one example of a line that starts on one side of the page and moves to another side (beginning another line?), and then establish some questions regarding the practice of this singular poetry and where it leaves the reader.

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