The Blackbird

Christian Schlegel

Across five talk poems, composed mostly in public and revised in tranquility, Christian Schlegel's The Blackbird takes up (and puts down somewhere else): the Catskills, Fancy Lad Skateboarding, Robert Musil, Lee Lozano, UFOs, Toni Erdmann, childhood, short stories, and friendship. In "thought refracted through speech and formed into lines," The Blackbird addresses us in every sense of the present tense, making private enthusiasms public through its sharp, generous fidelity to the mind’s search for patterns just below the surface of the known.

'What is the minimal displacement possible between life and art? Christian Schlegel offers answers by channeling a rangy series of improvised talks on reality and exhaustion into an immensely pleasurable, casually mind-blowing book that feels like drinking through the small hours with your smartest friend. Conversation glides from UFOs to Lee Lozano, narratology, ninth graders’ takes on Mirror. But what’s most moving to me about these poems isn’t their formidable eloquence and charisma but how they talk to hear what goes unsaid between people—what we don’t know we know, things we want to be true.' – Margaret Ross