IT WAS TODAY
NEW POEMS BY ANDREI CODRESCU
(Coffee House Press, September 2003)

In praise of his poetry, The New York Times calls Andrei Codrescu "one of our most prodigiously talented and magical writers." He is also an audacious and passionate poet whose new work is the perfect tonic for America’s political, literary, and cultural hangovers. The heart of this first new collection in nearly a decade is an elegant conceit containing the “recently discovered” correspondence between a warrior and a courtesan in fourteenth-century China. This sequence offers a seductively beautiful contrast to poems about modern life and millennial malaise that are both unsparing and intimate, inventive and playful.

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From Publishers Weekly
Codrescu, certainly not unknown as a poet, and widely recognizable as a cranky cultural commisar on public radio, has written a book that is valuable in the way that, say, Pete Townshend's solo records were, as crafty expressions of a guy whose more radical (druggy, horny, vagrant, political) days are behind him, but whose pop and zing has been mellowed not with age so much as the bodily memory (tobaccoey fingers, shattered tear ducts) of having seen more than most. His "to a young poet" is as myopic as it is aptly ventriloquistic: "& then if you publish a big/ book of poems I'll read/ one or two & give you my/ begrudging approval in the name/ of the new flock even though/ we are lost & nobody cares/ if we live or we die." His light formal touch includes almost exclusive use of lower-case letters and very little punctuation, providing a limpidity that allows the poet to dart from style to style and length to length. Some of these poems seem slight, but none lack the contrapuntal effects and occluded phrases of dialectical thinking; every poem has a beginning statement, a middle where it is countered and worked through, and an end that turns the tables on it all in a winning, often wittily poignant way: "now we are here what should we / do with our accents // do like me I say / keep talking."
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
“Reading it was today, today, you will feel much better about your tomorrows. It is the work of a master of Musketeer Bebop Poetics, the wild big-hearted wit of American poetry Andrei Codrescu. it was today ranges from short sharp hits to longer rambles, including the wonderful sequence ‘Lu Li & Weng Li,’ a miniature novel in verse, and many trips back to past todays (‘eliade: a poem’). Andrei’s Poet’s Hat with its Grand Panache leads the way through this madding vale of tears and laughter: as long as we don’t lose sight of it, we’ll make it through.”—Anselm Hollo