Primary Source

Primary Source presents Jason Schneiderman’s most exuberant volume of poetry, as he plays with the literary canon and explores his own personal archive. Starting with rewritten lyrics that put Cole Porter’s “You’re the Top” squarely in po-biz, Schneiderman takes on everyone from Shakespeare to Ashbery, making stops along the personal and the political, and interrogating ideas of race, sexuality, and love. Playful and profound, Schneiderman’s light touch is guaranteed to send tingles up your spine.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“Jason Schneiderman’s Primary Source is a sparkling demonstration of this principle: a poet evolves by making as many aspects of the self as possible available on the page. By turns sardonic and sincere, nakedly vulnerable or armored in irony, the wild magpie intelligence shaping these poems plucks threads from Shakespeare and Stein, borrows forms from Cole Porter and Wittgenstein, and bows to a variety of influences so vast (Sylvia Plath and David Lee Rothe) as to constitute a way of situating the self, introducing the dizzily happy reader to a queer subject, a livewire thinker at work, a breathing human presence.”—Mark Doty