The Redcoats

THE REDCOATS is a book of doubts. An elegy and celebration of those fragments of a specific American history always at risk of reduction to kitsch and irony. These poems attempt to manufacture a sense of identity from the contradictions of a self-consciously contemporary perception of these historical tropes, and the overwhelming sense of being ill-equipped to abide in those perceptions. Rather than applying a historical context to the contemporary, THE REDCOATS provides a contemporary context to the historic (in the manner, for example, of the painter Larry Rivers).