Rough Trades

Charles Bernstein is, simply put, one of the most influential and widely read poets of our age. One of the true masters of irony in poetry, Bernstein manages to also infuse each poem with an affirmative vision which verges on the utopian.
Bernstein is a poet of language, in the fullest sense of that word, a poet who “want[s] no paradise, only to be / drenched in downpour of words …” In Rough Trades, language is taken in every direction possible, from the straght lines of jokes filled with pregnant pauses (George Burns) to the paratactic lines of a Hennie Youngman, and from the lines of Maoist thought to the lines of ladies’s dresses which his father pushed — not downstairs in the stree but upstairs in a factory as the head of a dressmaking company. These lines of language, of thinking, intersect, dissect, converge, and emerge again as new ideas and emotions, hit and bounce and point and disappear over the horizon, only to reappear from the periphery.