{"product_id":"9781935402824","title":"Compulsive Words","description":"\u003cbr\u003ePoetry. \"Reading the poems in COMPULSIVE WORDS is like taking a hard drug.\"—Aaron Kiely\u003cp\u003e\"Michael Ruby's new book is experienced as a kind of sotto voce diction, an unrelenting mumbling in the back of the mind, which takes two very different forms: as a graphic representation of voices (words presented in diagrammatic patterns), and as what might be 'transcriptions' of those diagrams and patterns: 'O paper placement machines\/Blue ladder to family problems' or 'Somnabulist prows to leaven\/Healthy escarole.' Or perhaps the diagrams are transcriptions of the other texts: the tense dialectic between these two poles is one of the things that makes this book well worth contemplating.\"—John M. Bennett\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eOn January 29, 1999, my older brother was near death in a Boston hospital after emergency surgery for a blood clot in the abdomen. As I sat near the phone in Brooklyn that morning, trying to type up an old manuscript, it suddenly occurred to me that I was experiencing an extreme emotion, dread, and that I should see which words this extreme emotion displaced in my mind. While writing the poem \"Dread,\" I perceived certain words repeatedly appearing, forcing themselves on me, taking over the poem. From then on, during composition, I noticed the appearance of these \"compulsive words,\" which I first collected in the poem COMPULSIVE WORDS in 2000, and whose number has continued to grow ever since.\u003c\/em\u003e—Michael Ruby\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BlazeVox Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47019571347696,"sku":"9781935402824","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781935402824_p0.jpg?v=1763655987","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781935402824","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}