Proxies: Essays Near Knowing

by Brian Blanchfield

Overview

Past compunction, expressly unbeholden, these twenty-four single-subject essays train focus on a startling miscellany of topics —Foot Washing, Dossiers, Br’er Rabbit, Housesitting, Man Roulette, the Locus Amoenus—that begin to unpack the essayist himself and his life’s rotating concerns: sex and sexuality, poetry and poetics, subject positions in American labor (not excluding academia), and his upbringing in working-class, Primitive Baptist, central-piedmont North Carolina.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781937658458
Publisher:	Nightboat Books
Publication date:	01/04/2016
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Brian Blanchfield is the author of two books of poetry, Not Even Then and A Several World, which received the 2014 James Laughlin Award and was a longlist finalist for the National Book Award. His book of essays, Proxies: Essays Near Knowing, was published in April 2016. Recent essays and poems have appeared in Harper’s, BOMB, Guernica, The Nation, Chicago Review, The Brooklyn Rail, A Public Space, The Paris Review, and The Awl. He has taught as core faculty in the graduate writing programs of Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles and at the Universityof Montana, Missoula, where he was the 2008 Richard Hugo Visiting Poet. A 2016 Whiting Award winner, he lives with his partner John in Moscow, ID, where he is as an assistant professor of English at the Universityof Idaho.

Table of Contents

A Note
On Owls
On Completism
On Sardines
On Br'er Rabbit
On Foot Washing
On Propositionizing
On the Locus Amoenus
On Man Roulette
On Withdrawal
On Tumbleweed
On Containment
On House Sitting
On Minutes
On Authorship
On the Leave
On Confoundedness
On Abstraction
On Peripersonal Space
On Dossiers
On Frottage
On Reset
On the Ingénue
On the Understory
On the Near Term
Correction.
Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

[Blanchfield] calls the essays "inroads to disinhibited autobiography." One becomes acclimated to, and impressed by, the way he transitions from, say, an etymological investigation of billiards terminology to the way his father shot pool.

The New York Times - John Williams

★ 02/22/2016
The 25 essays in this collection from poet Blanchfield (A Several World) are small, highly polished jewels that together form an intricate mosaic. Giving himself the project of following a thought to its uncomfortable edges, in each entry Blanchfield picks a subject—foot washing, authorship, owls—and examines it from several angles until the connection between metaphysical principle and lived experience suddenly crystallizes, often producing an analogy as surprising as it is lovely. Blanchfield will typically betray a glimpse of erudition—a reference to cult cinema, Greek tragedy, or Noam Chomsky—alongside raw confession, balancing “a poetics of impersonality” with “disinhibited autobiography.” Thus, the billiards term “leave” proves connected to his father’s departure, a meditation on ingénues extends to his experience of 9/11, and the story of a dog bite becomes the story of his coming out. The themes of secrets and concealment pervade the collection, as does a “spellbound trade in vulnerability and openheartedness” conjured by Blanchfield’s prose style, with its catch-and-release rhythm—sometimes lyrical, sometimes barbed. The concluding essay “Correction,” which fills in or corrects details for the other selections, offers its own tribute to the processes by which we construct meaning—the real subject of this elegant and astonishing book. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

2016 Whiting Award in Nonfiction 

Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Memoir 

Finalist for the PEN USA Literary Award in Nonfiction

“A collection of idiosyncratic, candid, devastating essays…it’s the most brilliant book I’ve read in years. Anyone who has been amazed (and rightly so) by Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts should read this book posthaste.”—Garth Greenwell, The Guardian 

“The quiet but searing vulnerability in Brian Blanchfield’s writing is as wide and trembling as the wingspan of his otherness. He writes with a beguiling sagaciousness that made me bow my head so many times that I lost count. These are essays about honesty and the revelation of self in which shame and guilt are dissected and anything extraneous scrubbed away. Each sentence is a live wire. Diverse, maybe mismatched styles, genres and topics accrue to great and moving effect, a profound whole made from an unlikely assemblage of parts. He appears to be forging a new genre before your very eyes.”—2016 Whiting Award Judges’ Citation 

“Proxies: Essays Near Knowing brings a slowed-to-meaning lens to the remembered moments of a life. Blanchfield’s readers wander into his ordinary-extraordinary quotidian―the vulnerable longing of a singular voice expressing a peopled intelligence. Not since Hilton Als’ White Girls have I read anything as interrogative, unsettling, and brilliant.”—Claudia Rankine 

“Into what some are calling a new golden age of creative nonfiction lands Brian Blanchfield’s PROXIES, which singlehandedly raises the bar for what’s possible in the field. This is a momentous work informed by a lifetime of thinking, reading, loving, and reckoning, utterly matchless in its erudition, its precision, its range, its daring, and its grace. I know of no book like it, nor any recent book as thoroughly good, in art or in heart.”—Maggie Nelson

From the Publisher

2016-01-18
A prizewinning poet confronts the challenges of creative nonfiction and the struggles of his career in a collection of high-concept, densely packed essays. Both the title and the concept require explanation. As Blanchfield (A Several World, 2014, etc.) explains in the opening "Note," "a proxy in one sense is a position: a stand-in, an agent, an avatar, a functionary." It might provide an approximation of an identity, as many of these essays that verge on memoir do, yet it is never exactly the same thing. The essays also offer approximations of sorts, as the author appropriates the concepts and words of others, sometimes in paraphrase, sometimes in direct quote—though he acknowledges, "I decided on a total suppression of recourse to other authoritative sources. I wrote these essays with the internet off." In other words, he wrote from memory, another dimension of identity, and only afterward checked what he had written against the sources, resulting in a final section titled "Correction," which, at 20 pages, is longer than any of the essays. Following each essay title is the same subhead, "Permitting Shame, Error and Guilt, Myself the Single Source." Since the author organizes the essays in the order written, loosely following a chronological progression through his life, he suggests, "whatever development can be tracked may correspond to what might be called a self. They are not the same thing. This is a book braver than I am." Blanchfield describes himself as "a poet's poet" who has cobbled together a living through adjunct and visiting poet teaching assignments. His homosexuality caused a rift with his fundamentalist mother, with whom he had been very close, and the broken marriage that bore him had him take a new surname (and identity?) when his stepfather adopted him. He writes plenty about his sexual proclivities and relationships, including the longest and latest one with a former student, but even more about the essence of poetry and the relationship between writer and reader. Often illuminating and occasionally impenetrable.

Kirkus Reviews