Aaron Lowinger's open night: a gush

Open Night by Aaron Lowinger. San Francisco: Transmission Press, 2008. 32 pp.

Designed by Logan Ryan Smith, the poems in this book continue from the end flyleaf onto the back cover of the book. I'd never seen a book do that before. I've never read poems like these before. Here is a returning book, half of it published the year before, but now bigger, wider, ever & even more generous.

Lowinger doesn't waste a single word, or even a syllable. That I would do likewise in acknowledging his art. This chapbook contains 50 poems, all of them entitled "open night". It suggests "opening night," the big introduction of a new work--art, musical, a play, or the first day of baseball in the spring. Or a request: "open, night". Open all night, like a 24hr store.

Open Night has the recipe, gives you a blend of the finest choicest meters. Creeley's tight syncopation, hip-hop's matter-of-fact skips, samples, and scratches, and watershed meditations nourish every single time scale sermon in smoke of night. My series, "The Table," is a cheap knockoff propped on spindly legs. The Buffalo News should give him $1000.

Yes, Virginia, this book is a tuxedo.

open night

Your mouth opens
like the movies do
your clock continues
to click
you make me feel like sleeping
in different places
speaking many tongues



*.*