A Guide for Making Fragments from Diaries

By Joshua Beckman

• Description
• Reviews

• Joshua Beckman’s new book, A Guide for Making Fragments from Diaries, gathers poems found or made in various forms—chapter summaries of non-existent books, body poems, an assemblage of his mother’s remarks while painting his portrait, lists of thoughts and things (one of all the uninvited animals and insects who entered his house over the course of a year!). The book culminates with the guide, including light instructions toward finding fragments within a notebook or diary. 

   

  
  

• Readers interested in the fragment as a form, or in the relationship of the body to perception will appreciate how Beckman unfolds and rearranges the physical phenomena he describes.
  Publishers Weekly

  Previous Praise:
  Beckman’s soulful theatrics...have taken the humorous lyric to new heights, but perhaps less readily appreciated is Beckman’s mastery, not just of the quotidian, but of the tragic.
  Virginia Konchan, Rattle
  

  Beckman's one of my favorite living poets—unsoiled as he is by trends and camps. He walks in stride with Whitman and Niedecker and Ginsberg somehow, without sounding like a throwback full of archaisms or faux wit.
  Joshua Marie Wilkinson, HTMLGiant
  
  That’s the kernel, the approach, of The Inside of an Apple: a minimalist in transit, on a strict ration of words per line, each poem feeling as if it took its own length not just to devise its closing phrase, but to earn it.
  Peter Longofono, Coldfront

  Beckman wistfully takes to the road and does the incredible work of writing poems full of desire, for a world in the midst of radical upheaval.
  Publishers Weekly
  
  With plainspokenness and the juxtaposition of modern and traditional imagery, Beckman creates a sense of both timelessness and timeliness—no easy task. It’s Beckman’s sincerity, combined with his ability to not take things too seriously, that gives his poems a subtle power. It’s rare to read work that feels simultaneously contemporary and ancient.
  Michelle Aldredge, Gwarlingo
  
  The poems that make up The Inside of an Apple are light-hearted even when they’re sad. They’re also fragmentary, appearing without titles, blurring where one poem ends and the next begins. But this is by design; the poems’ sentence fragments are highly visual, and show great care for sound.
  Elizabeth O'Brien, New Pages
  
  These are poems that work gently, respectfully, insistently, almost reverently around the incommunicable. They do this without giving up on communicating something important.
  Dan Alter, Poetry Flash