Description

Roof Books, paperback

Publication Date: October 9, 2022

Publisher Marketing: The former Queens Borough Poet Laureate, Paolo Javier was the recipient of a 2021 Rauschenberg Foundation Artist Grant, featured artist in Greater NY 2015 and Queens International 2018: Volumes. He has produced three albums of sound poetry with Listening Center (David Mason), and is the author of five previous full-length books.

TRUE ACCOUNT OF TALKING TO THE 7 IN SUNNYSIDE is a book of experiments with the para literary and hybrid text, inhabiting the space/s of the poem &/in cinema, collaboration, comics, curation, public parks, social media, sound art, and occasional walks in the neighborhood. Spanning cinema, drawing, collage, and sound, Javier’s poems engage a wide range of subjects and entities, including art fairs, a new public park on the West Side Highway, the deaths of pop music icons, gentrification, world revolutions, and the work/worlds of Joseph Cornell and Robert Seydel. True Account of Talking to the 7 in Sunnyside is also an homage to Queens, the borough that continues to inspire and make possible Javier’s restless poetry.

“Paolo Javier’s poems are magic carpets of extravagant textures (visual and verbal). Javier combines an engagement with the social politics of the local with a commitment to aesthetic freedom that exultantly borders on abandon (a band’s dome): a ‘communard pulveriz[ing] rapaciousness.’ Onwards!” Charles Bernstein