Zero Star Hotel
2002
First Published
4.41
Average Rating
101
Number of Pages
Poetry. The son of Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley, Anselm Berrigan has been surrounded by poetry and poetics his entire life, a fact that was much noted after the publication of his first book, INTEGRITY & DRAMATIC LIFE (also available from SPD). But ZERO STAR HOTEL, while it will impress most of those early readers, may also suprise them. Taking family relationships, including the death of his step-father Douglas Oliver, as his subject matter, Berrigan's new work evinces a startling range and depth: acute anger, confusion, frustration, and stark awareness of the complexity of his poetic inheiritance. While these poems manage to practice the surreal playfulness Berrigan mastered at an early age, the context is darker, the clever phrases ever more ominous. "some say oblivion/ it is where you lose/ the stains on your ivory/ semi-see through/ untucked dress shirt/ but the stains/ they reappear/ on the other side/ and you will pay/ to have them removed" (from "Zero Star Hotel") Kevin Killian
Avg Rating
4.41
Number of Ratings
80
5 STARS
57%
4 STARS
30%
3 STARS
9%
2 STARS
4%
1 STARS
0%
goodreads
Author
Anselm Berrigan
Author · 8 books
Anselm Berrigan is the author of four books of poetry, including Free Cell, Some Notes on My Programming, Zero Star Hotel, and Notes from Irrelevance, and is the co-editor with Alice Notley and Edmund Berrigan of Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan. He is the poetry editor for The Brooklyn Rail, and formerly served as Artistic Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church. He lives and works in his hometown of New York City.
