The City is Lush With / Obstructed Views :: Greg Nissan
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EXCERPT
If it is you
Lay and remove the scaffold,
It won't be called making
But revision tills the hand
Hedonic. It loses its loss
scratching fraction
THE BOOK
Cities are not epiphanies. They don’t explode with meaning, but unfold. A long-exposure syntax. They are made of copper, glass, and burnt brick. They are made of the space between copper, glass, and burnt brick. They are made of people who are not copper, glass, burnt brick, or space. Despite a sign that says “this way to the city center,” the city is an edge producing centers. Every street I walk down becomes the center. Any street I walk down will never be the center, since the city is an image, a distant skyline, with which the smallness of my walking is never commensurate. I wrote these poems to dramatize the spawned and cancelled axes of the city. Turning the corner, breaking the line. Possibilities and closures. The city is the space we share: for whom does it open, and for whom does it close? Who dictates its gait, and who is subject to it?
THE AUTHOR
Greg Nissan is a writer and translator. The City Is Lush With / Obstructed Views is his first chapbook. His poetry has appeared in Asymptote, BOMB, Boston Review, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Hotel, Prelude, Theme Can, and Washington Square Review. He also writes art reviews for Frieze. A translator of contemporary German-language poets, such as Uljana Wolf and Ann Cotten, he served as the poetry editor for SAND: Berlin’s English Literary Journal from 2016 to 2018.
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