John Beer
The Waste Land and Other Poems (2010)
*Winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America*
*Shortlisted for The Believer Poetry Award*
Click here to order The Waste Land and Other Poems or our other titles.
John Beer's first book, The Waste Land and Other Poems, was published by Canarium Books in April 2010. His work has appeared in Verse, The Brooklyn Rail, Denver Quarterly, Crowd, and elsewhere.
Click here to read John's poems at the Poetry Foundation archive.
Click here to watch John read at the University of Chicago.
Click here to watch John read at Pilot Books.
"Only a genius could write a book called The Waste Land and Other Poems. Well, John Beer is that person. 'I set out to write a treatise on failure, and it turned out my subject was love,' he writes. 'Call it my confusion.' We should all be so confused."
- John Ashbery
"Am trying in a handful of sentences to write a blurb for John Beer's The Wasteland and Other Poems - something that will describe the newness of the work and something that will praise the invention of it. Have been halfway tempted to simply steal a snippet from someone else's jacket and tailor it to suit J.B. If only it were that easy! Anything I find on the rack is too small. John Beer is a poet of big shoulders. You should have a feel for yourself."
- D. A. Powell
"There is in John Beer, as I have known since our days in London, a bit of the last younger American poet living the tragedy of Europe. Thus, I was pleased when he sent me the manuscript of The Waste Land and Other Poems (originally titled He Do the Police in Different Voices), asking for my editorial suggestions. Magnanimously, he accepted them all, and so this book is leaner by half than its writer originally envisioned. Strong poets like he know that false pride of Authorship is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture. I wrote to him, among other things, in the margin: The image is more than an idea; it is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy!! I also wrote: I guess the definition of a genius is a man or woman surrounded by lunatics. Well, I'll say the following and I won't say more. The Waste Land and Other Poems may or may not be the most important book of American poetry in the last eighty-eight years, but when the next eighty-eight years are up, I give it a good shot to be the most important first book in American poetry since Some Trees. I've been right a number of times before, even if no one seems to be listening. Sometimes lightning strikes a church tower and the whole town catches fire. Who cares then that the act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions? There is surprise and there is awe. Nationalize the big banks."
- Kent Johnson
"John Beer's long overdue first book is a perfect mirror of a world that has borrowed more than it can ever repay. He embraces and distills 'the bad dream' and all 'the muck' of the recent past, but the momentum of this book is full speed ahead. Unflinching, unrepentant, soulful, brilliantly imagined and with eyes wide open, he is the poet of onwardness for the next century. If ever a book lives up to its title, this one does."
- Lewis Warsh
Click here to read a review of The Waste Land and Other Poems in the Boston Review.
Click here to read a review of The Waste Land and Other Poems at the Boston Globe.
Click here to read a review of The Waste Land and Other Poems at the Colorado Review.
Click here to read a review of The Waste Land and Other Poems at the Quarterly Conversation.
Click here to read an interview with John at Chicago Postmodern Poetry.
Click here to read two of John’s poems at Jacket.
Click here for a video of John reading at the 2009 Chicago Printers' Ball.
*Winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America*
*Shortlisted for The Believer Poetry Award*
Click here to order The Waste Land and Other Poems or our other titles.
John Beer's first book, The Waste Land and Other Poems, was published by Canarium Books in April 2010. His work has appeared in Verse, The Brooklyn Rail, Denver Quarterly, Crowd, and elsewhere.
Click here to read John's poems at the Poetry Foundation archive.
Click here to watch John read at the University of Chicago.
Click here to watch John read at Pilot Books.
"Only a genius could write a book called The Waste Land and Other Poems. Well, John Beer is that person. 'I set out to write a treatise on failure, and it turned out my subject was love,' he writes. 'Call it my confusion.' We should all be so confused."
- John Ashbery
"Am trying in a handful of sentences to write a blurb for John Beer's The Wasteland and Other Poems - something that will describe the newness of the work and something that will praise the invention of it. Have been halfway tempted to simply steal a snippet from someone else's jacket and tailor it to suit J.B. If only it were that easy! Anything I find on the rack is too small. John Beer is a poet of big shoulders. You should have a feel for yourself."
- D. A. Powell
"There is in John Beer, as I have known since our days in London, a bit of the last younger American poet living the tragedy of Europe. Thus, I was pleased when he sent me the manuscript of The Waste Land and Other Poems (originally titled He Do the Police in Different Voices), asking for my editorial suggestions. Magnanimously, he accepted them all, and so this book is leaner by half than its writer originally envisioned. Strong poets like he know that false pride of Authorship is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture. I wrote to him, among other things, in the margin: The image is more than an idea; it is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy!! I also wrote: I guess the definition of a genius is a man or woman surrounded by lunatics. Well, I'll say the following and I won't say more. The Waste Land and Other Poems may or may not be the most important book of American poetry in the last eighty-eight years, but when the next eighty-eight years are up, I give it a good shot to be the most important first book in American poetry since Some Trees. I've been right a number of times before, even if no one seems to be listening. Sometimes lightning strikes a church tower and the whole town catches fire. Who cares then that the act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions? There is surprise and there is awe. Nationalize the big banks."
- Kent Johnson
"John Beer's long overdue first book is a perfect mirror of a world that has borrowed more than it can ever repay. He embraces and distills 'the bad dream' and all 'the muck' of the recent past, but the momentum of this book is full speed ahead. Unflinching, unrepentant, soulful, brilliantly imagined and with eyes wide open, he is the poet of onwardness for the next century. If ever a book lives up to its title, this one does."
- Lewis Warsh
Click here to read a review of The Waste Land and Other Poems in the Boston Review.
Click here to read a review of The Waste Land and Other Poems at the Boston Globe.
Click here to read a review of The Waste Land and Other Poems at the Colorado Review.
Click here to read a review of The Waste Land and Other Poems at the Quarterly Conversation.
Click here to read an interview with John at Chicago Postmodern Poetry.
Click here to read two of John’s poems at Jacket.
Click here for a video of John reading at the 2009 Chicago Printers' Ball.