Interloper

In the United States, where much of the daily discourse appears to be reduced to matters of dollars and cents, the poet is an interloper who traffics where he doesn't belong. L. S. Klatt is vividly aware of this phenomenon. For him, words are musical and versatile, more about play than utility, and he seeks to dislocate language, to freelance and maneuver, to alter common sense on the way to new sense.

The poems in Interloper unsettle frontiers between disparate worlds so that the imagination is given room to roam: pears become guitars, racks of ribs are presented as steamboats, and helicopters transmute into diesel seraphs. The poetry aspires acrobatically in the manner of prayers and pilots, but adventure throughout the book is viewed as precarious and the will to conquest leads to apocalypse and ruin. The interloper wanders through crime scenes and crash sites as he glosses the landscape?at home and not at home with the America of yesterday and tomorrow. In symbols that scat and ricochet, the interloper scores a new song, one that composes?and decomposes?on the page.

Reviews

"There are cows of a higher mathematics in Interloper's pages. Invention, imagination, thinking invited to test what is new, what hasn't been imagined?these are given pride of place in Klatt's poems. . . . The book is a field guide for any mind exercising to learn unknown transfers and connecting combinations."

Dara Wier, author of Reverse Rapture

"His voice is deliberate and wise, making no dogmatic claims. . . . His poetry is steeped with humility before the vastness of space and the harshness of reality. . . . His subtle humor carries the book from beginning to end in one sitting. . . . Words tumble together into a symphony of images, often correlated only by their context. Together the sounds and their meanings paint a large sonic canvas peppered with explosions of life and stasis, an image to be read over ages. . . . Interloper is a cohesive body, indicative of many years honing. Its vibrant images of memory and doubt, despite their ambiguous cohesion, foster a common ground between author and reader. Existence is portrayed as equally uninviting and inevitable.""

Verse

"In his first book, Juniper Prize winner Klatt marches through the jungle of overused words and symbols to create a refined language yearning to be new. . . . Klatt's poems are charged with primeval energy that rejects finalities in meaning and embraces the act of becoming. The result is rewarding reading for those who seek a unique and fresh poetic voice."

Library Journal