Starsdown

Poetry. Jasper Bernes's magnificent and multi-layered first book, STARSDOWN, emerges as a record of Los Angeles as its physical space collapses into specters and marks, where "the sky is a swimming pool" and the signs and stars keep switching places. Beneath the glittering surface of the last American city, this book animates the profusion of irreconcilable vernaculars and histories that the city's "pastel-washed meta-burglaries" have contrived to make disappear. An archaeology of futures past and futures to come, STARSDOWN improvises a poetry which stands finally as actual invention and possibility.