Lost and Found

"Lost and Found by Michael Gottlieb stresses the 9/11 poetry genre to the limit. In " The Dust" he lists with clenched jaw items found in the rubble of the downed Twin Towers, moving from computer terminals and memos to the names of individuals who died in the collapse, driving through his list with all the impact of the most intense lyric poem. But Lost and Found goes beyond 9/11 to the rest of the world, exposing the situation we find ourselves in, a droll conversation of partially identified yet fully understandable characters: " how much smaller may we dice you" . No poet writing today captures the immediate sense of being caught off guard. Lost and Found is a read-this-&-change-your-life experience: the first great poetic work to emerge from the trauma of September 11. Imagine Frank O' Hara channeling Teodor Adorno with more than a little Marcel Duchamp to modulate the static into a whitenoise reverb feedback loop. It is, in fact, just like that & completely different: three radical works that test our limits as readers & as people. Michael Gottlieb's masterwork is one terrific book." -Ron Silliman