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Unnamed Canyon

by Brian Glaser

Unnamed Canyon is a book in two parts: first, a meditation on teaching and teachers; and second, a consequent exploration of the major themes of the author’s formative years in higher education in the nineties. The questions he visits and revisits are of our moment—the relation of imagination and reality changes like the seasons, each poem a renewed response to the elemental forces that shape our lives.

POETRY / General

ISBN: 978-1-962082-44-0 (print; softcover; perfect bound)

LCCN: 2024948592

Copyright 2024; released December 12, 2024

78 pages

Author Biography

Brian Glaser is the author of six books of poetry and many essays on poetry and poetics. He lives in Santa Ana, California, and teaches art and history at Chapman University.  
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Endorsements

“Brian Glaser is a spiritual seeker, which involves continually testing wisdom from several spiritual traditions. But the major emphasis is on an effort to produce as absolute a clarity as possible about elemental features of his life—natural, personal, familial, social, and political. Innocence becomes as fundamental as air; desire as fundamental as water. So poetry itself has to renounce metaphor and elaborate form in order to hew as closely as possible to honest renderings of surprising moments where the shadows lift and the mind responds to something worth enduring. These moments seem utterly bare. The poetry resides in the resonance of what comes to matter as it just comes into language, often weaving sites of contradiction that also serve as means of recognizing how intractably solitude, social pressure, and familial ties serve to foster one another. Poetry becomes a process of imagination ceaselessly adjusting to shifts in possibilities of responsiveness. And the moral life becomes inseparable from fostering careful attention to what creates and binds our passions.”
—Charles Altieri, author of Reckoning with the Imagination: Wittgenstein and the Aesthetics of Literary Experience; professor of English, University of California, Berkeley

“. . . evokes things like Frost and Whitman, seeing something haunting in nature, but probably more like Frost because the human element is so present and nostalgic, the way the poet seems to recognize the detachment from nature and feel a bit sad about it, missing something, and yet in a way that makes for a lonely sort of beauty.”
—Quick Sip Review of “Earthly Paradise”

“This book of poems uses poetic technique, intellectual material, memory, and emotion in unexpected and moving originality. Like a good teacher, the poems come right at the reader with bald questions and make the reader struggle with them. The reader doesn’t feel alone though. The quest for ‘inventive solutions to intractable questions’ is shared painfully, humorously, and with great tenderness. We are left with a wry wisdom and raw elements, in a space between all thought, where the real activity occurs silently.”
—Beth Jacobs on Contradictions in Journal of Poetry Therapy

Articles and Reviews