The Strugglers is Norman Fischer's fourth book of poetry with Singing Horse Press. Divided into six poetic sequences, “Norman Fischer's new poems … make you stop and think—about everyday life and its sampled commodifications—about global turbulence and local pleasure.”
San Diego, CA: Singing Horse Press (January 10, 2013)
“Norman Fischer’s new poems — including a rhetorically stunning series after Mandelstam — make you stop and think — about everyday life and its sampled commodifications — about global turbulence and local pleasure. These poems create a path for reflection as a means for intensified sensation and transformation. ‘No end to ending, no beginning to beginning, no beginning to ending, no ending to beginning.’ Start here now.”
“For decades Norman Fischer, a Zen teacher, has been writing poems that unseat conventional frameworks of reality, and, in turn, what we usually think of as religious or spiritual poetry. In The Strugglers the ground is even more unstable than in his previous collections; he moves fluidly between modes of writing, subjects, and perspectives, as someone completely at home in language. With so much suffering and confusion in the world, we are fortunate to have a clear-sighted poet in Fischer, who provides clarity in the chaos ‘I used to be one now I many.’”
“Elegy, philosophy, magic: the deepest and most playful awareness: simultaneity, love: human voices wake us and we drown in a world of flow and loss and damage: poetry was meant to be this: Norman Fischer’s The Strugglers is one of the bravest and most generous books of poetry I have ever read (one of the most beautiful books of poetry I have ever read).”
“‘Nothing arrives late that’s not on time’ concludes the most hopeful of the six works that compose this sad, brilliant, wise collection of writings — I’m tempted to call them poems, because that is what they are, or at least where they began eons ago. Norman Fischer writes from the end of an empire in which ruins take on the countenance of suburban malls, in which you can feel the breath of so many peers flickering like candles in stiff winter winds. Now, that ineffable, impossible transfer point between Self & Other, future & past, is hiding here in every letter, every space between letters, even this period. Nobody gives more completely of himself in the act of writing than Norman Fischer and, like every poet I know, I am in awe of this gift.”