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G.C. Waldrep
One Way No Exit

Poetry
8.5" x 5.5", 56 pages, side-bolted
150 numbered copies
May, 2008
$10 includes shipping in US

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“There are only two human figures in all of America,” G.C. Waldrep declares in One Way No Exit, “and I have already seen them. Everything else is socks and recognizance, flutter and mood.” Waldrep builds on photographer Peter Rathmann's portraits of the American landscape to create a lyric inquiry into the nature of patriotism, spirituality, photography, 20th-century American visual art, and what he terms “the surprisingly unmapped avoidances of America's small towns.” Moving quickly between snapshot takes of the South and West and the works of Mark Rothko, David Hockney, Joan Mitchell, Cy Twombly, and many others, Waldrep attempts to make of his poem a bubble-like iridescence, “a skin on which objects rest.” “This is in the nature of the medium,” Waldrep concludes, “God visited upon objects. A photograph, like David Hockney, is a poem that looks good when it doesn't have to.”

About the Author

G.C. Waldrep’s collections of poems are Goldbeater’s Skin (Colorado Prize, 2003), Disclamor (BOA Editions, 2007), and a chapbook, The Batteries (New Michigan Press, 2005). He lives in Lewisburg, Pa., and teaches at Bucknell University.

Readings & events for G.C. Waldrep & One Way No Exit

July 1, 2008: New York, NY
Jenny B0ully, Gregory Pardlo, and G.C. Waldrep
Poetry from the Rooftops
Sponsored by Academy of American Poets and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation.

6:30 p.m. @ the Arsenal Building at Central Park
64th Street at 5th Avenue (next to the Zoo)
FREE
Please call 212.360.1324 or email rsvp[at]parks.nyc.gov to reserve your free ticket.