Poem
The king’s two bodies
Still open, face down upon the bed
Searching their jackets
My brother and I
Had never imagined them dead
Part of our allegiance
Was cutting open their little fingers
The lines ran down
Into horribly uneven parts,
Mirth, brilliance, and luxury
Clash by night
We left the key poems
Alone in the room
And beyond recognition
Unlocking the door twice more
We disowned them.
A subtle DJ who uses repetition and slight variations on lines to amplify his sound.
Guillermo Juan Parra
This is the second coming of Cedar Sigo’s Selected Writings in a new expanded edition bound to dig a bi-coastal poetic aqueduct with heartland tricklers. Sigo’s work is most aptly compared to plumbing without the pipes: water flows in elegant designs through invisible walls at a touch. Originally released in the spring of 2003, the first edition of Sigo’s book quickly sold out; the present edition adds a number of new poems to the surviving text and comes sheathed in a freshly offset & letterpressed cover designed by Jeremy Mickel.
Cedar Sigo is a poet and sometime teacher, active in the art and literary worlds since 1999. He studied writing and poetics at the Naropa Institute. He is the author of seven books and pamphlets of poetry, including two editions of Selected Writings (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2003 and 2005) and most recently, Expensive Magic (House Press, 2008). His poems have been included in many magazines and anthologies, and he has published poetry books and magazines under the Old Gold imprint. He participated in “Coordinates: Indigenous Writing Now,” a conference at California College of the Arts. He has read at the Poetry Project at St. Marks Church, Bowery Poetry Club, PS1 Museum of Contemporary Art, Beyond Baroque, San Francisco Poetry Center, the San Francisco LGBT Center, Intersection for the Arts, and Small Press Traffic, among others. He has collaborated with visual artists including Cecilia Dougherty, Frank Haines, Will Yackulic and Colter Jacobsen. Currently, He is guest editing the second issue of The Can, a journal devoted to writing on poetics. His second full length collection Stranger In Town is due out from City Lights in fall 2010. He lives in San Francisco.
Cedar has added ten new poems to the original four of that manuscript, along with a slight change in one of the sections of the long poem 'O Twist No Inferno.' As I've been reading through the book, I love how the additional poems provide a new context for the first four. I get the sensation of familiar music being played through new instruments, remixed or extended versions of favorite songs. Like many poets I admire, Cedar is a subtle DJ who uses repetition and slight variations on lines to amplify his sound. [...] Rereading 'O Twist No Inferno' two years later, I see it as an ambitious and effective long piece. [...] There's a hardness to Cedar's lines and stanzas that signals a serious dedication to poetry and her affiliates. [...] Much like Juan Sánchez Peláez did in his final collection, Aire sobre el aire (1989), Cedar accomplishes a great deal with only 14 poems. 'O Twist No Inferno''s epic allusions spread throughout the entire collection, allowing individual lines to serve as chapters, books within the book.
Guillermo Juan Parra, Venepoetics
ISBN: 978-1-933254-05-0
Trade Paperback
Perfect-bound. 48 pp, 4.5 x 7 in
Publication Date: January 01 2005
Distribution: SPD