Something for Everybody

“The political arrives in pieces, settling across his sprawling poems like dew or debris. Berrigan has always matched his experimental drive with a personable quality.” —Boston Globe

Anselm Berrigan’s eighth collection of poems, Something for Everybody, is exactly as its title describes. Wide-ranging in forms, densities, and aesthetics—and written from numerous collaborations, prompts, and influences—these poems express poetry’s astonishing possibilities. At the same time, they evince this sin- gular poet’s consciousness in the here and now, as a family and community member looking at the seams of public life.

For consciousness the world is décor: sentences cast about
For bodies in the exuberant wobble factory Q-Bert believes
In me in the dark to pass out and check yourself out gliding
By storefront windows searching for a feeling no one’s felt
In the last twelve seconds lathered with coeval nightmare
Rhetoric of sociable extinction bashful as a wraith eking out
A line of image extract to sprinkle on a plenty reeling mind. . .

Anselm Berrigan is the editor of What is Poetry? (Just Kidding , I Know You Know): Interviews from the Poetry Project Newsletter (1983–2009), and is the author of many books of poetry, most recently Come In Alone and Primitive State. From 2003 to 2007 he was Artistic Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. He is Co-Chair, Writing at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts interdisciplinary MFA program and also teaches part-time at Brooklyn College.

Anselm Berrigan is the editor of What is Poetry? (Just Kidding, I Know You Know): Interviews from the Poetry Project Newsletter (1983–2009), as well as the author of seven books of poetry: Come In Alone (Wave Books, May 2016), Primitive State (Edge, 2015), Notes from Irrelevance(Wave Books, 2011), Free Cell (City Lights Books, 2009), Some Notes on My Programming (Edge, 2006), Zero Star Hotel (Edge, 2002), and Integrity and Dramatic Life (Edge, 1999). He is also co-author of two collaborative books: Loading, with visual artist Jonathan Allen (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2013), and Skasers, with poet John Coletti (Flowers & Cream, 2012). His chapbooks include Pregrets (Vagabond Press, 2014), and Sure Shot (Overpass, 2013). He is the current poetry editor for The Brooklyn Rail, and co-editor with Alice Notley and Edmund Berrigan of The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (U. California, 2005) and the Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan (U. California, 2011). A member of the subpress publishing collective, he has published Selected Poems of Steve Carey (2009) and Your Ancient See Through by Hoa Nguyen (2002). From 2003-2007 he was Artistic Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, where he also hosted the Wednesday Night Reading Series for four years. He is Co-Chair, Writing at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts interdisciplinary MFA program, and also teaches part-time at Brooklyn College. He was awarded a 2015 Process Space Residency by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and in 2014 he was awarded a Robert Rauschenberg Residency by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. He was a New York State Foundation for the Arts fellow in Poetry for 2007, and has received three grants from the Fund for Poetry. He lives in New York City, where he also grew up.