Elemenopy (New American Poetry) [first edition]

Poet Michael Coffey created Elemenopy as a book, rather than as a collection of poems, in order to represent a procession of struggles and outcomes in his and the poems' relationship to language. The first section, "Loving," contains playful poems that delight in the promise of poetic form and lyric utterance. "Lichen," the second section, is made up of two longer prose poems, each a kind of ill-fated narrative event. In the third section, "Otherwards," Coffey appropriates the words and techniques of other authors - namely Gertrude Stein and the poet Jackson Mac Low - to break through to fresher possibilities for narrative. "Javajazyk," the concluding section, invents a language in which to tell the love story of Vasteny and Ombaly.