from “Praise Pseudograph V. 2 (La Vue)”
 … If you were
to write the story backward,
knowing it all, Reverse yellow silk
folding night after night
of unfolding, I’d brighten
backward, my impulse to
not a bundt-cake unbridled … in the
sparkle of the outside
and not an easily applied cos
metic inner confirmation
downgrading or, back-pedaling
of Sun in me suddenly 4 horizon
passions are most often different
The Green Ray is gloriously unblurbable.
Mónica de la Torre
The Green Ray is relentless—in its syntactical and almost kaleidoscopic subversion of univocal emotion, its contrapuntal speed and delay, intimacy and pretense, security of sources and formal promiscuity. The poems both sense and want to, enacting a rigorous aesthetic engagement that never quite achieves synthesis, instead posing writing itself as dialogic longing. It is Corina Copp’s first full-length collection of poems.
Corina Copp is a writer and theater artist based in New York. She is the author of the chapbooks ALL STOCK MUST GO (Shit Valley Verlag, UK), Miracle Mare (Trafficker Press), and Pro Magenta/Be Met (Ugly Duckling Presse), among others. Her writing can be found in Cabinet, BOMB, Boston Review, Corrected Slogans: Reading and Writing Conceptualism (Triple Canopy); SFMOMA’s Open Space, and elsewhere. She is developing a three-part play entitled The Whole Tragedy of the Inability to Love, inspired by the successive forms of the work of Marguerite Duras. Excerpts have been presented at the NYC Prelude Festival, Dixon Place, and through the support of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace program. She is a curator at the Segue Foundation and a 2014 NYFA Fellow. The Green Ray is her first full-length book.
Brand names and their attendant ®s might be sprinkled throughout The Green Ray, yet, except for these registered trademarks, this exquisitely dissociative book seems free of any utterance previously registered in English. Copp’s liminal language—unmoored from identifiable references, its syntax and articulations torqued to the point of estrangement—asserts, above all, her material’s plasticity and unfixity. Its effect is such that straight talk rings deadeningly ordinary. May promo be a case in point. The Green Ray is gloriously unblurbable.
Mónica de la Torre
What is this postindustrial flume of a poetic line, radiant with French-film gift-packs, recidivist vocabulary, heart on spin art? I don't know, but everybody will be imitating it next year, and I'm in love with the whole damn hadron accelerator.
Catherine Wagner
Corina Copp is a phenomenologist of love's catastrophic syntax.
Michael Nardone
Corina Copp’s The Green Ray defies description, but here goes: Copp uses highly entertaining neologisms, homonyms, and tricky rhymes, within a seriously hacked prosody of incompletion, to build a lived linguistic world. Where “vernal spackle” lightly daubs a fragile mise-en-scène, a countdown to crescendo/collapse is underway. Her characters’ talk and writers’ pronouncements create a chatter that would not be uninteresting to the NSA. But if this world is in danger of unbuilding, as her constant cutting-off of lines at the knees suggests, it’s also first in line for recuperation. Maybe I’m finding what I want, but I see humanism, rehabilitation, give and take, here. “Hum / in lactate" she says; then, “Antagonist, never let / Go."
Jean Day
It’s hard for me to talk about Corina Copp’s writing without suffering.
Josef Kaplan
Other UDP titles from Corina Copp here
ISBN: 978-1-937027-58-2
Trade Paperback
Perfect-bound. 104 pp, 6 x 9 in
Publication Date: April 01 2015
Distribution: Asterism Books (US)