Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Sardonic Arm

The Sardonic Arm

Bodenheim, Maxwell

Paperback

General Poetry

ISBN10: 937841656X
ISBN13: 9789378416569
Publisher: Alpha Edition
Published: Nov 10 2026
Pages: 58
Weight: 0.20
Height: 0.14 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
North Clark Street becomes a stage on which American city life exposes its bargains, appetites and contradictions. Workers, clerks, shop-girls, stenographers, waitresses and entertainers emerge from streets, offices, restaurants and theatres, their physical realities set against the conventions and abstractions imposed upon them. Sardonic irony cuts through sentimentality, while grotesque humour and vivid imagery reveal the pressures of labour, class and commerce. Form shifts as restlessly as the lives under observation. Free verse meets rhyme and sonnet; dramatic dialogues and monologues sit beside narrative character sketches, allowing public speech, private thought and social performance to collide. A prose foreword prepares the ground for poetry that tests literary realism and artistic language against popular culture, sexuality and racial identity. Rather than smoothing away discomfort, the collection keeps body and intellect, feeling and thought, nature and social convention in unresolved contention. Beyond the urban pavements, the poems move through domestic interiors, farms, village stores and a prison cell, widening their scrutiny without losing sight of ordinary and marginal figures. Mortality, time and metaphysical speculation enter a world governed by wages, appearances and physical fact, yet no single form or voice is permitted to settle the argument. This is urban poetry alert to the comedy and cruelty of social meanings, and to the unstable language used to defend them. This book was out of print for decades and is now republished by Alpha Editions. It has been restored for today's and future generations. This edition is not just a reprint - it's a collector's item and a cultural treasure.

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