Kyle Schlesinger was born in Providence in 1976. He studied poetry and pedagogy at Goddard College, and went on to study poetics with Robert Creeley at the University at Buffalo, where he earned his doctorate in 2005. The author of over twenty books of poetry and criticism, Schlesinger currently lives in Austin, where he runs Cuneiform Press and directs the Graduate Program in Publishing at UHV.
A deadpan ode to American speech, the poems in this collection take fresh bits out of Capitalism’s hide. Parts of Speech defines a generation’s disillusionment in a post-Occupy world.
—Brenda Coultas
Parts of Speech ventriloquizes even as it amputates clichés and idiomatic expressions, where the cumulative effect is more exhilarating than terrifying, due in part to this book’s underlying architectonics. Overheard conversations, radio broadcasts, film titles, allusions and elisions swirl about on another. Enjambments snowball into a torrent of clauses, refusing disambiguation. Schlesinger’s darkly humorous collage of Americana evokes an other-reflexive strategy and an obtuse coherence.
—Tyrone Williams