Rouge State

Poetry. Flarf. Rodney Koeneke was born in Omaha in 1968 and grew up in Tucson and Los Angeles, and has lived in or about San Francisco since 1986. His book of history, Empires of the Mind, which tells the story of the British literary critic I.A. Richards, is forthcoming from Stanford University Press. ROUGE STATE is his first full-length poetry collection. "In ROUGE STATE, Rodney Koeneke puts the blush back on the demotic. His idiomatic montage is a careening screed dictated from a state of alert, all puns intended to turn the hose back on a culture run literally amuck, and whose marquee reads: Raw, Red, Rouge, Incarnadine. Welcome to these states!"-- Michael Gizzi.