Specialties
Books
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Green and Gray Geoffrey G. O'Brien's second collection documents the "remorse of the senses" that attends each moment of experience, the pain and pleasure of not exiting a world in which injustice and distraction secure every sensual event. Attempting to reestablish experience as something other than complicity, these poems insist on "desiring that which is as if it were not," making poetry out of neighborhood .... | |
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Metropole Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s third collection opens with a set of lyric experiments whose music and mutable syntax explore the social relations concealed in material things. O’Brien’s poems measure the “vague cadence” of daily life, testing both the value and limits of art in a time of vanishing publics and permanent war. The long title poem, written in a strict iambic prose, charts the disappearance of.... | |
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The Guns and Flags Project Obsessed with work and dream, shot through with weather and color, Geoffrey G. O'Brien's spirited debut pursues the possibility of the lyric itself--whether the voice raised "with melodies/and thinking" can be rescued from the ongoing disaster of progress. In roving five-beat lines the poems pass again and again through scenes of liminality--sunset and dawn, falling asleep and waking up, border c.... | |
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People on Sunday 'Brien's [is] a poetry that asks for patient attention, and gives back all the void's abundance."—Rain Taxi "Whether in a poem composed using words and phrases from the Patriot Act, a sestina with dauntingly common repeating end words, or in flat-out theory, O'Brien shows himself to be capable of portraying the muddled traffic of life in the Internet age."—Publishers Weekly (starred review for Me.... | |
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Experience in Groups Experience in Groups sings and thinks the forms of belonging that organize our lives, offering poems that move with honesty and formal intelligence between the individual and the collective. In a time of ascendant fascism and creative political resistance, O'Brien's work demands that an elegy, love poem, and a sonnet sequence become occasions where personal tragedies and joys find a pattern and a .... |
Recent English Courses Taught
Fall, 2018
| Course & Section | Course Name | Course Areas |
| 143B/2 | Verse |
Creative Writing Workshops |
Spring, 2018
| Course & Section | Course Name | Course Areas |
| 131/1 | American Poetry |
American Literature Poetry |
Summer, 2018
| Course & Section | Course Name | Course Areas |
| 166/1 | Special Topics: Speculative Fictions, Possible Futures |
Novel Special Topics |
Fall, 2017
| Course & Section | Course Name | Course Areas |
| 143B/3 | Verse |
Poetry Creative Writing Workshops |
| 180L/1 | Lyric Verse |
Middle English Renaissance and Early Modern Shakespeare British 18th-Century British 19th-Century British 20th- and 21st-Century American Literature African American Literature Poetry Literary Theory |
Spring, 2017
| Course & Section | Course Name | Course Areas |
| 143B/2 | Verse |
Creative Writing Workshops |
| 180L/1 | Lyric Verse |
Renaissance and Early Modern British 18th-Century British 19th-Century British 20th- and 21st-Century American Literature Poetry Literary Theory |
Summer, 2017
| Course & Section | Course Name | Course Areas |
| N166/3 | Special Topics: American Poetry, 1650-2016 |
American Literature Poetry |
Fall, 2016
| Course & Section | Course Name | Course Areas |
| 131/1 | American Poetry |
American Literature Poetry |
| 243B/1 | Poetry Writing Workshop |
Creative Writing Workshops Graduate Courses |
Spring, 2016
| Course & Section | Course Name | Course Areas |
| 165/2 | Special Topics: 21st-Century U.S. Poetry |
American Literature Poetry Special Topics |
| 243B/1 | Poetry Writing Workshop |
Creative Writing Workshops Graduate Courses |
University of California, Berkeley
English Department
322 Wheeler Hall,
Berkeley, CA 94720-1030
general phone: 510-642-3467
