Some Mantic Daemons
Garrett Kalleberg
“...Garrett Kalleberg already seems on the way to establishing a unique presence among the more idiosyncratic voices in contemporary poetry. Packed with rhetorical, sometimes self-defeating questions (“What good is a skiff / on the lake of fire?”) on the one hand, and epiphanic delusions (“I come and go in a semblance acquired / in perfection’s technics”) on the other, Kalleberg does Kafka as dinner theater for the local Mensa chapter out on the town.”
—Fred Muratori, Boston Review (read entire review)
“Some Mantic Daemons is downright joyful in its sharp, ecstatic rage...Kalleberg uses the most down-and-dirty science, religion, psychology, mathematics and metaphysics—from Molech to Bataille to those gross little worm-feet—as a way to investigate existence.”
—Jen Coleman, The Poetry Project Newsletter
“Language moves through concrete forms to make conceptual frames. The relating Angels of the book give it power, strength and the gifts to record, create and destroy. Is God DNA? The spirit a function of the cells?”
—Dale Smith, Possum Pouch (read entire review)
“A prophetic ferocity joins visceral appetite in Garrett Kalleberg’s powerful new collection; spirit and matter couple to spawn a ravishing anxiety, ‘a beautiful disaster.’ As if language were a skin wrapped around the world's body, which ruptures and spills its will to be named. For those who wish to go where poetry is rendered as a limitless limit, fretted with knowings and unknowings and their generative inquisitions. Once again, the life of the mind finds its avatar.”
—Ann Lauterbach
“I found a book (The Monster Lives of Boys & Girls), learned the beloved’s possible name, watched a ‘body lost also in beauty, sadness, simple joys’ and intellection, found out some things about myself, Armageddon and origin, felt sad, laughed, and then, yes, came clean out the other side; and it was another side, some other side I’d not seen before, but dark and light.”
—Eleni Sikelianos
“Some Mantic Daemons is a deft, inventive work, fraught with linguistic pleasure. Drawing variously from the rhetorics of science, religion, psychology, and metaphysics, Kalleberg investigates the place where proof and belief overlap in a logical moiré- ‘And all along, a familiar/pattern, until strangely / this looks like my own home.’ Displaced by an impossibility of the Singular, these poems move like bare nerves through ‘a medium in which / the absolutes oscillate,’ to take root in countless specific meanings and instances of being.”
—Heather Ramsdell
On Garrett Kalleberg’s Psychological Corporations:
“The speaker of “From a Psychological Atlas” tracks "very very very small scale” emotional movements from behind a terrifyingly blank lab coat, while he of “Agoraphobia” gazes “at the panorama and the whole”... In 18 lyrics that take neo-Eliotic alienation to the breaking point, Kalleberg finds the zero point where morality disappears in action and feeling.”
—Publisher’s Weekly
“…a plain, sometimes brutal, but brutally honest poetry.”
—Rain Taxi
About the Author
Garrett Kalleberg is the author of Psychological Corporations (Spuyten Duyvil), Limbic Odes (Heart Hammer), and co-author of a forthcoming play The Situation Room. His poems and reviews have appeared in Sulfur, First Intensity, Denver Quarterly, Mandorla, American Letters & Commentary, and in An Anthology of New (American) Poets (Talisman House). He is a graduate of Cooper Union and of the Masters in Writing program at City College of New York where he twice was awarded the Academy of American Poets prize. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he publishes the online literary journal The Transcendental Friend, and audio CD imprint Immanent Audio.
Reviews and Links
Review of Some Mantic Daemons, Boston Review
“...Garrett Kalleberg already seems on the way to establishing a unique presence among the more idiosyncratic voices in contemporary poetry. Packed with rhetorical, sometimes self-defeating questions (“What good is a skiff / on the lake of fire?”) on the one hand, and epiphanic delusions (“I come and go in a semblance acquired / in perfection’s technics”) on the other, Kalleberg does Kafka as dinner theater for the local Mensa chapter out on the town.”
—Fred Muratori, Boston Review (read entire review)
“Some Mantic Daemons is downright joyful in its sharp, ecstatic rage...Kalleberg uses the most down-and-dirty science, religion, psychology, mathematics and metaphysics—from Molech to Bataille to those gross little worm-feet—as a way to investigate existence.”
—Jen Coleman, The Poetry Project Newsletter
“Language moves through concrete forms to make conceptual frames. The relating Angels of the book give it power, strength and the gifts to record, create and destroy. Is God DNA? The spirit a function of the cells?”
—Dale Smith, Possum Pouch (read entire review)
“A prophetic ferocity joins visceral appetite in Garrett Kalleberg’s powerful new collection; spirit and matter couple to spawn a ravishing anxiety, ‘a beautiful disaster.’ As if language were a skin wrapped around the world's body, which ruptures and spills its will to be named. For those who wish to go where poetry is rendered as a limitless limit, fretted with knowings and unknowings and their generative inquisitions. Once again, the life of the mind finds its avatar.”
—Ann Lauterbach
“I found a book (The Monster Lives of Boys & Girls), learned the beloved’s possible name, watched a ‘body lost also in beauty, sadness, simple joys’ and intellection, found out some things about myself, Armageddon and origin, felt sad, laughed, and then, yes, came clean out the other side; and it was another side, some other side I’d not seen before, but dark and light.”
—Eleni Sikelianos
“Some Mantic Daemons is a deft, inventive work, fraught with linguistic pleasure. Drawing variously from the rhetorics of science, religion, psychology, and metaphysics, Kalleberg investigates the place where proof and belief overlap in a logical moiré- ‘And all along, a familiar/pattern, until strangely / this looks like my own home.’ Displaced by an impossibility of the Singular, these poems move like bare nerves through ‘a medium in which / the absolutes oscillate,’ to take root in countless specific meanings and instances of being.”
—Heather Ramsdell
On Garrett Kalleberg’s Psychological Corporations:
“The speaker of “From a Psychological Atlas” tracks "very very very small scale” emotional movements from behind a terrifyingly blank lab coat, while he of “Agoraphobia” gazes “at the panorama and the whole”... In 18 lyrics that take neo-Eliotic alienation to the breaking point, Kalleberg finds the zero point where morality disappears in action and feeling.”
—Publisher’s Weekly
“…a plain, sometimes brutal, but brutally honest poetry.”
—Rain Taxi
About the Author
Garrett Kalleberg is the author of Psychological Corporations (Spuyten Duyvil), Limbic Odes (Heart Hammer), and co-author of a forthcoming play The Situation Room. His poems and reviews have appeared in Sulfur, First Intensity, Denver Quarterly, Mandorla, American Letters & Commentary, and in An Anthology of New (American) Poets (Talisman House). He is a graduate of Cooper Union and of the Masters in Writing program at City College of New York where he twice was awarded the Academy of American Poets prize. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he publishes the online literary journal The Transcendental Friend, and audio CD imprint Immanent Audio.
Reviews and Links
Review of Some Mantic Daemons, Boston Review
