Separate Objects Selected Poems

The idea of a book-as-a-poem guided Dennis Barone's selections for "Separate Objects". "You want to follow the railroad tracks like an Indian ear to the track" ("Sweet Chariot"). The poems put as much stress on listening to words as sounding them. "How can I speak, / if within is only silence" ("The Objects of Our Attention"). The epistemological theme running through the book -- how do we know and how do we know it -- connects with Robert Venturi's notion of the familiar shifted off its axis. "The familiar that is a little off", the architect has said, "has strange and revealing power".