EASYREEDER

Free Boat: Collected Lies and Love Poems (C&R Press)

Collected Lies and Love Poems, selects from a sequence of sonnets written from 2008–2015. Reed, the author of five previous books (three novels and two “stunts”), lends his voice and eclectic abilities to this singular work, which, in addition to being a book of sonnets, is part love letter, part literary ode, and part delusion. Evolving the classical sonnet, a form which still captures our spirits, Reed summons our contemporary yearning: sugar sweet to splash of acid. “Come to me,” writes Reed in sonnet #6, “like tomorrow to a child.” Sonnet #41, in contrast, offers the lyrical confession, “All I want to do is stab people.” With his plaintive lines, Reed gives expression to the inner ghost of the Twenty-First Century; sonnet #65, a valentine, wonders “Momma, are there other wooden children?”Free Boat spans 54+ sonnets, and that’s a lot of sonnets, but Reed’s stylistic ease guides his audience through an experience more akin to reading a photo essay. Indeed, of the 23 images in Free Boat, 9 are photographs by the author. Rhapsody, serenade, picaresque, Free Boat would be as comfortably tabled with Nadja by Andre Breton, as it would be with The Dream Songs by John Berryman, Delta of Venus by Anais Nin, or Under the Net by Iris Murdoch.

Published by CONSCIOUS & RESPONSIBLE PRESS

The Last Sign You’ll Ever Read: An Interview with John Reed

(09/01/2016)

Susan Marque: The first thing that strikes me is the title? How did that come about and are you suggesting that we all have lies we tell ourselves or that we see those we love through a kind of lie?

John Reed: On the subtitle, yes on both counts. We are willfully wrong about ourselves, and we are willfully wrong about those we love. Love, to some degree, is a mutual and collaborative deception, or, if we want to be romantic about it, love is art.  

Free Boat. I would repeat it to myself. I’m sure by now I see more than is actually there: humor, meaning, pathos. I could do better on where the title came from. Years ago in Southampton, I was walking along with my to-be wife and we passed an old, decrepit boat on display. A sign offered: “Free Boat.” The last sign you’ll ever read.

John Reed

“The best way to write myself out of the project was to overwrite my own biography. I mean, who is this ‘I’ anyway?”

(10/20/2016)

Gee Henry: Your fiction usually contains some structural challenge—in this case, the sonnet’s form. Do you write this way to make it harder on yourself?

John Reed: It’s an earmark of literary pretension that the structures are derived from the content, rather than the reverse. The more genre-oriented [the work is], the more the structure comes first. Here I leaned toward structure as a prose person; prose writers, as poets, tend to work better with form. I think it’s partly about the storytelling itself. The structure of a sonnet is identical to a short story. It’s basically the Western argument—a structure I’m familiar with. I had the meter from Shakespeare, probably the path of least resistance. I love reading poets who are comfortable with no form whatsoever, who write poems that are just very shaggy and you don’t know what’s going to come next. But when I do that, I lose the thread.

GH: Eileen Myles is like that for me. When I read her I feel like she is using no form at all, that she’s just creating this kind of language and structure for the poems that is just totally her own.

JR: I was just putting her in a course syllabus, along with Ann Lauterbach, who also works brilliantly without a net. I love Lauterbach’s poems, the way she takes chances. On the other hand, I do have trouble containing them to a book, I do think of them as individual poems.

But sonnets though… Terrance Hayes and others work with sonnets now. There’s something about how contained they are, and our ability to read more than one of them, too, and attribute them as a sequence, which is unusual to poetry.

This may be what it takes to get people to read poetry. —Vice Magazine

John Reed’s Free Boat: Collected Lies and Love Poems is a brilliant and challenging tour de force. Which could be said about every book of his. —Michael Lally

John Reed exploded my concept of a sonnet. —Erika Anderson, Electric Literature 

There’s something dangerous here. —Elizabeth Trundle, The Brooklyn Rail

John Reed’s wonderful new book Free Boat: Collected Lies and Love Poems gives me that … love and quirkiness that I crave, while being a more interesting and fulfilling artistic experience. … Love poems with built in lies and upside down truths, in which you can find a story of your own—and how you think about relationships. —Susan Marque, Tin House

Reed is a real New York City character—mysterious yet completely accessible, old-school but cutting-edge. A few years ago, he started sharing some newly written sonnets. … Although they were largely about love, or desire, they weren’t really fit for readers looking for happy-ever-after scenarios. Many ended with a narrator seemingly suspended above a great metaphorical chasm, either about to descend into oblivion or ascend to something sublime. —Gee Henry, Bomb Magazine

Reed has brought music’s remix culture to literature with stunning results. —David Gutowski, largeheartedboy

Readers of contemporary poetry have marveled at what Diane Seuss and Terrance Hayes have accomplished with the serial form. To illuminate another brilliant practitioner, I give you John Reed. … These sonnets follow the misadventures of lovers who slip in and out of identities, variously becoming puppets, magicians, gamblers, witches, skeletons. It’s the speaker in these sonnets who anchors the project. Part id and part love-lorn ghost, we follow a voice into Luna Park and keep going, back into the very real experience of wanting what we want. I’m reminded that a poem is the perfect place to be lost, in danger, and full of feeling. —Laura Cronk