[PREORDER] The Blackbird by Christian Schlegel

Across five talk poems, composed mostly in public and revised in tranquility, Christian Schlegel's The Blackbird takes up (and puts down somewhere else): the Catskills, Fancy Lad Skateboarding, Robert Musil, Lee Lozano, UFOs, Toni Erdmann, childhood, short stories, and friendship. In "thought refracted through speech and formed into lines," The Blackbird addresses us in every sense of the present tense, making private enthusiasms public through its sharp, generous fidelity to the mind’s search for patterns just below the surface of the known.

“Thought refracted through speech and formed into lines: In The Blackbird Christian Schlegel unfreezes the cold war between the primordial elements of poetry. The lines stop the thought from forgetting how speech broke it. The speech tells the lines that talk doesn’t stop. The spaces within the lines remind speech that thought has no body.” – Michael Clune

"What is the minimal displacement possible between life and art? Christian Schlegel offers answers by channeling a rangy series of improvised talks on reality and exhaustion into an immensely pleasurable, casually mind-blowing book that feels like drinking through the small hours with your smartest friend. Conversation glides from UFOs to Lee Lozano, narratology, ninth graders’ takes on Mirror. But what’s most moving to me about these poems isn’t their formidable eloquence and charisma but how they talk to hear what goes unsaid between people—what we don’t know we know, things we want to be true." – Margaret Ross

Praise for ryman by Christian Schlegel (Ricochet Editions, 2022):

“What happens when pages talk? What are these forms of attention and involvement that they instigate – forms which feel so qualitatively different from reading even as I know that reading is exactly (is ‘all’) I’m doing? Christian Schlegel’s ryman is a transformative sequence of poems which gently, deliberately, with detailed concentration, as well as great risk and vulnerability, hold open a space-time for something like participatory rumination. To ‘read’ them is to play a part in their new social system. I was addressed, committed, and everything mattered.” – Kate Briggs

“‘To talk is very pleasant when it looks like writing,’ writes Gertrude Stein in Listen to Me (1936). Here, where to read is to hear and to talk is to compose, the reverse is the case. Schlegel’s wager is to run on by elaborating, digressing, extrapolating, and ruminating, to circle back to produce what David Antin refers to as ‘radical coherency.’ Radical because it develops ‘sometimes rather startlingly’ and is held together by something so elusive, it’s nothing if not pleasant. I, for one, am all ears.” – Mónica de la Torre

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Christian Schlegel is a poet born and raised in Pennsylvania. He has written two other books: HONEST JAMES (The Song Cave, 2015) and RYMAN (Ricochet, 2022). His poems and criticism have appeared in Lana Turner, the Kenyon Review Online, and the Cleveland Review of Books. Chris has worked as a teacher, is now studying to be a lawyer, and lives in New York City.