Waking from Myself: Preverbs

"Words say too much to let you know the truth.'' George Quasha's torqued, enigmatic proverbs create unlikely balances among discrepant engagements. *Waking from Myself* is the sixth volume published of George Quasha's "preverbs," an invented poetic genre that's the flipside of "proverbs"-instead of giving capsules of wisdom, they awaken language to its inevitable ambiguities in the face of complex truth-telling. The vectors of these marvelous poems work at cross purposes, keeping each other aloft. If William Blake's "Proverbs of Hell" are poetry, then George Quasha's preverbs are like a close cousin. Its core question is: can poetry say the unsayable?