Arielle Greenberg

Arielle Greenberg is renaming, reclaiming, reconstructing, and having fun doing it. In My Kafka Century, she builds a grotesque new world brick by brick, line by line. Blocks of memory become the air and soil of her poems, the fragmentation of which both stutters the reader and beckons him or her on. She creates a web of obfuscation, rhetoric, and image. Her writing is that oft sought after combination of accessible, sarcastic language with a densely layered intellectual project.

Greenberg weaves the struggles of gender politics and femenist identity, within the world and within the narrative I, so cleanly and plainly that it becomes an unquestioned hum, like the everyday expectation of voices and cars outside our windows. Her poetry is the poetry of the old city, be it European or American. My Kafka Century makes it quickly evident that simple description can invoke paranoia, desperation, and gravity, from line construction down through the very nouns and verbs she circles with. There is an urgency in her images, and a simple calm in her rhetoric.

My Kafka Century is both a communion with God and a struggle away from him. Faith becomes trial and ordeal, plea and hymn. A flight from God and an awakening to a new, more real, God. She takes every part of herself, her heritage, her identity, and dissects it piece by piece, wraps it inside out and ends up with something wholly new and astounding. If God made Greenburg in his own image, then the reverse must also be true.

Greenberg’s poetry is of the body without the body, without the mind needlessly taxing every feeling and whim. The great paradox of My Kafka Century is that her poetry is also the mind speaking without the weight of the body to narrow its scope. Her tales are broken nursery rhymes told dejected and after the fact. The book is staggering and unpretentious. Her words are musical and funny, distopic and prosaic, narrative and New York School, German Jewish and crass austere.

Greenberg takes a step back from the world, looking at it with laughing yet serious eyes. Humor and melancholy often go hand in hand in the human experience, and that comes across with great care and poetic furor in her lines. It’s been said that the good comedians see the world as a ridiculous place, the great ones don’t. My Kafka Century is something great.… (plus d'informations)