Double Venus

Synopsis

Structured as a series of poetic arguments, essays, and visions, Double Venus seeks a suitable language for reconciling various styles of commitment. The collection is especially concerned with facing the call to individual accountability in the context of industrialized patriarchy even as it is counting the manifold blessings of life in that context. Thus, expressions of indignation are always sewn here with desire, fellow-feeling, creature comfort, and the knowledge that the Good Life may still hold some sweetness, even if it must always also be a “work of worry.” Double Venus oscillates between more and less open formal strategies in an explicit effort to bring the lyric into conversation with other discourses dedicated to ethical practice. Likewise, the collection meditates on the place of ethics in territories traditionally thought to be the special province of the lyric – on the place of the lyric in territories traditionally thought to be the special province of ethics.

Reviews of this Book

‘Aaron McCollough knows that America and Thanatos are hiding something. His poetry uses all manner of devices, determined to find out what and where it is among concrete things and living creatures with their riotous emblems. And sings when a song is called for.’ —Alan Halsey

‘In Double Venus, Aaron McCollough fulfills a promise with a continuity, completes an errand with a deeper errand. Here is the Crashaw of us, crowned in jessamine. Here is a metaphysics we can use, now and in all the hap ahead.’ —Donald Revell