Published with Roof Books, and Potes & Poets.

Description:
“Jerry Estrin has devoted his work to a profound ethical debate with what we call history, consisting of those public places (and their times) in which a private person, wandering, most knows his or her presence — and absence. In the various and fascinating works collected here, intellectual motion is itself a position — or, one might say, a moral emotion. The result is a beautiful book — and one whose importance absolutely must not be ignored.”
— Lyn Hejinian

“Jerry Estrin’s songs are flat-out, epic, condensed, and still as a sunset — songs of bewildering brilliance and decay, they perversely construct the impression of helplessly over-determined, hard-boiled, common sense

in/of this thus far advanced avalanche called civilization, history collapsing into an internal present masked as absence: fringe benefit from the producers to the produced, a gift wrapped in an impermeable transparency. These poems face it with honesty, clarity of mind and heart, struggle on all fronts.”
— Steve Benson

“On the one hand, Rome, A Mobile Home is a scathing critique of the production of culture through the effects of empire and war. And our Synchronistic Citizen. Estrin, has achieved an exquisite orchestration of a poetics that takes on the morally binding and tricky dialogue between the human and the inhuman, between what we can and what we can’t control. This writing provides no reassuring escapes, and for this I am thankful. Rome is a powerful work, worthy of many readings."
— Carla Harryman

Rome, A Mobile Home makes good on its wonderful title: a pleasure and a warning. The sun never sets on the Empire’s trailer/theme park. Estrin takes aim at our culture’s tendency to reductive appropriation with laconic, fearsome wit. The famous (the known) are equivalent: Caesar and Roger Maris. ‘I will now be visible forever.’ We are all implicated. This is where we live.”
— Rae Armantrout

“Jerry Estrin has gathered together so many ‘spirit’ voices (on a ‘park bench’ by day) so amiably — agréable (-bly) — that, in a poetry ‘at least as well written as prose’, the batty (‘surrealist’) denunciation of the Emperor must do well/shall not be in vain! nor his exemplary/insurrectionist /funny ‘Citizen’s Dash’ of writing/thinking (my daily task) — an absolute (quietly accumulating/

accumulated/accomplished) model for us all!”
— Robert Grenier

Excerpt

From: Rome, A Mobile Home, 4

When you rush toward the flickering screen
The theater is missing.
Caesar expanded congruent with this space.

Of sovereignty there can be no grasp. To illustrate, one has only
to become enfranchised and utterly new, constantly there are
climate control systems in the middle of the forehead.

There are fairy tales flying into the familiar body of the empire.

Nothingness and silence, nothing but Caesar and banks,
and banks of stars.
Were there only blank stares over Rome?

They well straight up and enter the eradicated judges.
Uneradicated judges enter scene by scene.

From: Nudes, 1:

To emerge from power as a ghost
With one knee held out to stage light
To stage light
The ghost of a line
An analogy can hardly be conceived
With one’s own will
One is turned or returned upon one’s own kind
Or finding kindness
Reinvented
In toneless colors
Comprehensible because outside
A kind if comfortless
Ghost of a line
Of self-professed access
This shattered figure of victory

Cover text of Michael McClure’s book Plum Stones, Cartoons of No Heaven
Michael McClure has published over thirty books, wrote Janis Joplin’s hit song “Mercedes Benz,” overcame censorship with his play The Beard, and performed and recorded his poetry with piano improvisation by the Doors’ keyboardist and composer Ray Manzarek. From the history making “Six Gallery” reading in 1955, when he read with Philip Whalen, Allen Ginsberg, and Gary Snyder, to being celebrated in Jack Kerouac’s book Big Sur, Michael McClure and his work have pushed, and continue to push, the horizons of literary possibility.

McClure’s “advantage is Sheer Scope.” — Rolling Stone Magazine

“...Michael McClure shares a place with the great William Blake, with the visionary Shelly, with the passionate D.H. Lawrence...” — Robert Creeley

McClure is “a poet of the sensorium coursing in the realms of consciousness, a scholar of the visionary, a professor of beauty, a flashpoint at the intersection of the spiritual and the real.”
— Lewis Mac Adams in L.A. Weekly

“What appeals to me most about Michael’s poems is the fury and the imagery of them...The worlds in which I myself live...the private world of personal reactions, the biological world (animals and plants and even bacteria...), the world of the atom and molecule, the stars and the galaxies, are all there; and in between, above and below , stands man, the howling mammal, contrived out of ‘meat’ by chance and necessity.”—Francis Crick discoverer of the DNA double helix

“In McClure’s poems, the shapes are abstractions like DNA (statement of relation and in some poems one-word centered lines on a page) which as a language can’t ever be the same as the object (such as ‘black lily’). Yet he breaks down a distinction between text as object and the phenomenal object of ‘black lilies’ (words), and physical sensation (of the ‘speaker’ or reader of those words)...He transposes (enacts) the (comic book bubble) language of his poetry as theater; it is a mode of theater in both his poetry and his plays — in both, the distinction between surface and intuitive apprehension is broken down — or between that which is ‘visual’ and (that as) language.” — Leslie Scalapino

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