Visit the Barn Owl Review to check out Nick Sturm's recent interview with David Dodd Lee about his book Sky Booths in the Breath Somewhere: The Ashbery Erasure Poems."These erasures were a real learning experience for me. I'm stunned I had the intelligence and good luck to allow the whole thing to take place...What happened next, really, in terms of how I wrote the poems in The Nervous Filaments, was I began “erasing” during my own composition process. Before a line could even make it onto the page I'd have cut it off at the pass (because it was predictable or too transparent or felt like the next idea one might expect in a narrative poem—that is, a narrative poem that is simply linear, and causal). I don't want poems to enact the logical sequencing of thought (made manifest in language) created by a tunnel of time. I want them to feel fractured, elliptical, impressionistic. I want to feel the disturbing logic of dreams at work."
"To sit down with David Dodd Lee’s fourth full-length collection of poetry, The Nervous Filaments...Find yourself a glass of wine and prepare to be transcendently transported to a parallel sphere. Poem by poem, Lee is going to deconstruct his world, “I believe in words. One by one/they dismantle everything I have faith in” (Wildlife), and then, reader, he’s going to deconstruct your world, and hand you the pieces “in the gray-green part of your eye–/a busted out headlight” (Not A Landscape, Not A Teaspoon), every piece infused with the emotion of living in an emergent world tragically tilted, perennially askew."
