Living Room

Geoff Bouvier

APR/Honickman First Book Prize winner

In Living Room, boxes of typeface materialize from white space—literal boxes with proportions and corners where visitors might recline comfortably, or discover they’re trapped. Each piece brims with industry and restless attention, and the dramas they contain are manifold. In style and substance, Living Room enacts the urgency one feels to stretch out against cramped quarters of any dimensions. Acoustic, evocative, Bouvier’s multi-layered writing unsettles perimeters: the margins of the page and the limits of cognition.

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ISBN: 9780971898189

Format: Paperback

ISBN: 9780971898172

Format: Hardcover

The House in Order

You wanted to build a house? I wanted to build a house. We should
not have built a house. We built a house.
We should not have gone into the house. If you went inside,
you left. If I went inside, I left. This was our arrangement.
You put dreams inside the house. There was you in golden
clothes and rosy colors in the dreams. Also in the house. You put
changes also in the house, after I left. You left.
I put changes and ways to look at changes in the house. We
lived on different pages in the changes. Also in the house.
We passed each other going to and coming from the house.
We drew a line with two sides to it.
If we touched hands, it was too much. We touched hands. It
was not enough.
We should not have found ourselves inside a house. We lost
ourselves, we found a house. We found a house, we lost the house.

About the Author

Geoff Bouvier’s first book, Living Room, was selected by Heather McHugh as the 2005 APR/Honickman Prize winner and was published by Copper Canyon Press. His second book, Glass Harmonica, appeared in 2011 from Quale Press. In 2009, he was poet-in-residence at the University of California, Berkeley. For five years, he wrote long-form magazine journalism for San Diego Reader, publishing over fifty cover stories. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, The Denver Quarterly, …

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Reviews

“The narrating voice in Living Room is insistent but quiet, though it sometimes achieves loudness without any apparent effort. At other times it seems to continue in the reader’s mind even after stopping for the day. It is an important new presence, faintly disturbing and endlessly attractive.” —John Ashbery

“They are funny. No, they’re not all funny—some are even disturbing. Let us say they are by turns funny, contemplative, angry, bewildering, witty, mysterious, whimsical, solemn, lively, gentle, outrageous, and stern. What’s sure is that these tight and explosive paragraphs of Bouvier’s have an unfailing and diversified energy all their own, riveting our attention and showing us the unfamiliar within what we thought we knew.” —Lydia Davis

“Poetry is being born. It is even perhaps the desire for a new poetry that is at the heart of poetry like Bouvier’s. Not experimentation of finding, merely, but a whole resolution to think of what experience and discovery might mean in a bleak time. Bouvier is athletic, accurate, and burgeoning. Too often we think we are in a bad way, stranded between ancient feuds between abstraction and figuration, but the iconomachia is finished. The joy of this volume lies in an unarmed escape at Cythera, where we do not even know whether we are coming or going there, but poetry, fresh and free, is being born.” —David Shapiro