'Formally consecutive but radically paratactical, these lines are never let loose portentously to dilate. While Wakeling's poems may aim to nullify Larkin and bog men, archaeologies of cultural inheritance, neither do the poems' Japanese intertexts serve any smug distortion from empty mind to Western mindfulness, a 'porcelain pseudo-history' glazed with ego delusory in vaunted self-denial.
'That's what these poems offer old lyric technology turning against its partiality to lull, to wrap up, the poems are fast as ice. I go outside and at the top of the street, it is bitterly cold and at the bottom sweltering, humid. Here is the street, here is the weather at every extreme. Transit becomes transit.' John Wilkinson' (Publication summary)
'There could be no more apt place or no-place to read Corey Wakeling’s Uncle of Cats than in an hotel room in the American Midwest, rain outside, sudden sunlight, rain resumes. Here, time feels to be suspended and shuffles in cloud strata while bursts of indignation skitter from the TV. Now-time arrives as arbitrary markers slicing through no-time, making for a jump-cut prosody. Wakeling’s poems acknowledge, in passing, since all is in passing, those past and present stars that still deliver, now and then, ‘formerly inconsecutive’ lines. They shift as light girders, constructions, blinking from Ted Berrigan, Tom Raworth as well as Modernist Japanese poets.' (Introduction)
'There could be no more apt place or no-place to read Corey Wakeling’s Uncle of Cats than in an hotel room in the American Midwest, rain outside, sudden sunlight, rain resumes. Here, time feels to be suspended and shuffles in cloud strata while bursts of indignation skitter from the TV. Now-time arrives as arbitrary markers slicing through no-time, making for a jump-cut prosody. Wakeling’s poems acknowledge, in passing, since all is in passing, those past and present stars that still deliver, now and then, ‘formerly inconsecutive’ lines. They shift as light girders, constructions, blinking from Ted Berrigan, Tom Raworth as well as Modernist Japanese poets.' (Introduction)
