The Year of the Rooster (The New Series, 54) - Softcover

Noah Eli Gordon is the co-publisher of Letter Machine Editions, an editor for The Volta, and an assistant professor in the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he currently directs Subito Press. His recent books include THE YEAR OF THE ROOSTER (Ahsahta Press, 2013), THE SOURCE (Futurepoem Books, 2011), and Novel Pictorial Noise (Harper Perennial, 2007). His essays, reviews, creative nonfiction, criticism, and poetry appear widely, including journals such as Bookforum, Seneca Review, Boston Review, FENCE, HAMBONE, and in the anthologies Postmodern American Poetry (W. W. Norton & Co., 2013), A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line (University of Iowa Press, 2011), Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (Northwestern University Press, 2011), Poets on Teaching (University of Iowa Press, 2010), and Burning Interiors: David Shapiro's Poetry and Poetics (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007). An advocate of small press culture, he penned a column for five years on chapbooks for Rain Taxi Review of Books, ran Braincase Press, and was a founding editor of the little magazine Baffling Combustions. He lives in Denver with Sommer Browning and their daughter, Georgia.

Tracking the motions of these witty, reflective poems is like wandering through a chambered nautilus with a Virgil in a crisis of self-doubt about his mission. The nautilus resembles a mirrored city, then a garden, or it's sliced and pinned to the wall as art, or hung up like a human in a suit or skirt whose self-fashioned day is morphing. Audacious and brilliant work.
--Cathy Wagner

In the ocean of images a sonnet tide ebbs and returns while within that fearful symmetry identity picks a way between mirrors and windows grateful that thought has mergeable labels, that adjectives are nouns, and that no things abut ideas: The Year of the Rooster shall be your map and guide.
--Tom Raworth

Praise for NEG's previous work:

...one of our most prolific and important young poets. 
--Coldfront

Gordon zips back and forth between idea and detail, exposition pursued and exposition retracted, solemnity and shaggy-dog story, koan and blank joke...delightful, clever.
--The Nation

Ingenious and exciting...a thing of beauty, a work with a serious spiritual dimension, and a source of inspiration...  
--Publishers Weekly

...the naturalness of wordless birdsong...
--The Believer