The World in Place of Itself

“This passionate debut from New York City–based Rasmovicz places him on an unfamiliar border, between the haunted generalities of Franz Wright and the hunted, bomb-damaged villages of Charles Simic.” —Publishers Weekly “Bill Rasmovicz gives us the world in fine detail. City life, shoreline, night, loss and its shadow, desire—these come to us through an intelligence fully attuned to metaphor’s striking shifts from sight to insight. This is lyric poetry at its best, fully accomplished, probing, deeply felt, with delicate wit and language—oh the language!—stunning enough to pass Miss Dickinson’s test.” —Betsy Sholl “The clear intensity of the visionary requires stillness, not high speeds. And there is a restlessness at the heart of such stillness that Bill Rasmovicz’s first book gets at more exquisitely—with a voice that can bear it—than any I’ve read in years. His surreal practices are humanizing faith-keepings with the metamorphic, the elemental, the actual.” —William Olsen “Incredibly moving and smart, this book is indeed a world in place of itself, and more, in place of the world we thought we knew. With stunning metaphors, fast paced leaps and tone shifts within a seamless art, we discover new ways of seeing at almost every line, a palimpsest of visions in every poem of this fabulous book.” —Richard Jackson