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Poetical Dictionary (Abridged)

Poetry. Lohren Green's POETICAL DICTIONARY concludes with chaos and begins with acrobatics. In between these he presents us with "both a book of words and a cosmos"; a linguistic gas cloud bounded by the universal and the particular. Green's project departs from the traditional dictionary, a peculiar contraption of sense and order. In the preface, he reviews the architectures of these teetering, teeming, linguistic edifices. His attitude towards words is almost that of a material scientist, exploding an individual specimen of language-"bulwark" "heft" "oyster" "purple" "torpid" "foreplay" — in order to ascertain its "synthesis of body and concept." Organized into SUBJECT WORD, PRONUNCIATION, ETYMOLOGY, and DEFINITION, each entry in the POETICAL DICTIONARY makes the traditional dictionary hiccup, divulging the stanza within the standard definition and the wiggle of wit in the pronunciation key. "addressable / glow unit of / information" — from "pixel."

  • Format
  • paperback
  • Pages
  • 104
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9781891190179
  • Genres
  • poetry
  • Release date
  • 2003