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“Christopher Janke has published a pretty book of poems. That’s obvious from the cover of Structure of the Embryonic Rat Brain alone: a mauve and purple tangle of presumable neuronal matter brushed with green. Fence Books, always pleasing with its designs, has cut Janke’s book wider than it is long and interspersed his poems with eye-catching doodles. If you flip the pages fast while staring at the lower right-hand corner you’ll see a rat put through its paces. This book makes it clear from the beginning that it intends on giving tactile pleasure while stimulating your mind. Like those famous lab rats pressing levers for cocaine, this book wants to keep you turning its pages.
Pretty continues into the poems themselves. I suspect Janke wouldn’t like this word – he’d probably prefer “complex,” “multi-noded,” “myelin-coated,” or “meiotically bold.” As someone delighted by grammatical skewering, intriguing page-jumps, and the abolishment of articles though, I call them pretty. Strikingly beautiful even, if you will, as in Janke’s opening words:
What kind of knife? What kind of throat? What steel? Who cuts the warp?
Who scissors through? Who pins the paws? What kind of pins? What color?
What creature? Who slices a head? What gory miracle? What unanimated
gelatinous – dead-pink & fatty. What kind slices? What kind
peers? What kind slices?”—Cyan James , www.newpages.com
Christopher Janke stops at nothing, not even the end of a line of verse, in the expression of forment. These meditations, set upon the synapses of a rat in embryo under knife, achieve potency through their own expression of nerve. Disjunctive and epistemic, the poems consider consciousness and demonstrate its wide, inchoate eye.
By turns ferocious and goofy in the service of their largest aims, these lines describe and evidence the springing of the animal mind into being.
Reviews:
“Janke is one of a very small handful of younger poets whose work manages to be both technically striking and humanly moving--there is always something miraculous about this combination, but these days it's especially heartening. I've been wishing his work would receive more attention, and am glad to see that happening now.”—Franz Wright
Endorsements:
“Dear Chris,
I'm in the hard core of my own writing, the idiot for everything else, in quite a happy state, and immediately when I started to read your rats, very strong, congratulations, I realized, I would be pushed out of my abbaissement mental (a Jungian term for being in heaven, out of one's mind), cannot afford it, please forgive me, it's not a good time for me for this, I try to fly, then I have readings in France, please forgive me, With my best wishes, your book will be very visible.”—Tomaz Salamun
From the Book:
“what grand consolation, what balm, what succor, what support, what solace in the air and of the air or in the knowledge of air or in a forced confrontation with air—or in the way I feel with other legs around me on the grass in the afternoon or in the hurling towards a something unknown or in asking why a need to console.”
Awards/Recognition:
Fence Modern Poets Series 2006
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CHRISTOPHER JANKE lives in Turners Falls, Massachusetts. He is a graduate of Eastern Nazarene College, in Quincy, Massachusetts, the University of Massachusetts in Boston, and U-Mass Amherst, too, where he received his MFA in Poetry. This is his first book publication.
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