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This audio version of acclaimed poet Charles Bernstein's most expansive and unruly collection to date is read in inimitable fashion by the author. It features poems, both tiny and grand, that speak to a world turned upside down. Our time of “covidity”, as Bernstein calls it in one of the book’s most poignantly disarming works, is characterized in equal measure by the turbulence of both the body politic and the individual. Likewise, in Topsy-Turvy, novel and traditional forms jostle against one another: horoscopes, shanties, and elegies rub up against gags, pastorals.....

Charles Bernstein is a leading voice in American poetry. Near/Miss, Bernstein’s first poetry collection in five years, is the apotheosis of his late style, thick with off-center rhythms, hilarious riffs, and verbal extravagance. This collection’s title highlights poetry’s ability to graze reality without killing it, and at the same time, implies that the poems themselves are wounded by the grief of loss. Performed by the poet, the book opens with a rollicking satire of difficult poetry and moves on to the stuff of contrarian pop culture and political cynicism.

Nirvana exploded onto a music scene that had no mind, no depth and no substance. A young audience, sick to the teeth of formula pop and sugar-coated, safe rock was quickly seduced by the dark and dangerous charisma of this loud, angry band hailing from 'nowhere' USA. This band were different. They were multidimensional. The songs could be angry, ugly or beautiful as hell, Kurt Cobain's voice and the thrashing guitars a nightmare or the saddest lament for lost humanity.