The Point! - Paperback
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Missing everything but the point: visual poetry celebrating excitement!
The exclamation point is much maligned. It's bad style. It's like laughing at your own joke. It screams, it yells, it's hysterical, it's maybe even embarrassingly obsequious.
Nasser Hussain disagrees! What's so bad about expressing enthusiasm? What if you really need to scream? The prescriptions of 'style' can feel like an artificial limit placed on our language, insisting we produce a bland monotone that trades on its appearance as rational, subdued, civilized discourse. Against this, The Point!, where poetry bangs its head against this veneer of rationality. Poetry, it insists, is exciting! Is, maybe, excitement itself!
The Point! is composed using only exclamation marks, seeking to reclaim the dignity of the bang's and explore its expressive possibilities. Against the well-known derision of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Elmore Leonard, and Gertrude Stein, Hussain uses the exclamation point to make a point: let's celebrate the possibility of enthusiasm!
Nasser Hussain is a Lecturer in Literature and Creative Writing at Leeds Beckett University in the UK. His first book, boldface, was published in 2014. He holds a PhD in English from the University of York (UK), an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Windsor, and a BA in English from Queen's University.
Nasser has had a number of occupations: treeplanter, wilderness guide, amateur restaurateur, and now academic and poet. He likes his new job best. For him, poems are best described as 'language with a pattern, ' and much of his recent practice takes pleasure in finding new patterns to wonder at. SKY WRI TEI NGS is the first expression of a larger interest in mass transit, and is his attempt to find a literal and poetic intersection between two things that 'move' us (in this case, planes, and poems). He currently lives in Sheffield, UK.
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