While gathering background info for this review of Laurie Price’s nimble and panoramic new book, These Pages Were Once Skin (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2025), I came across a notable milestone that caught my attention—that the author was in the first graduating class of the Naropa Institute’s (now University) Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in 1981. I, too, was at the Kerouac School in the Spring of that year,—quitting my job in the basement warehouse of J&R Music World near City Hall after hearing the late Lewis Warsh read a prose piece about teaching there, which ended with his admonition to his students: “Commitment. You need commitment to be a poet.

I have no recollection of meeting Price at Naropa, but I do remember the excitement of doing poetry full time without the interruption of shipping cartons of Emerson Lake & Palmer albums to Buenos Aries. Along with its austere cousin in San Francisco, the Poetics Program at The New College of California, the Kerouac School was the only writing program in the country back then which focused on experimental poetries and the writers of the New American poetry. The students I went to classes with were mostly aligned into two camps—acolytes of the Beat canon and those attracted to the poetics of the New York School. The evidence submitted in the pages of Price’s new collection is that she picked up the cues transmitted by the contingent of NY School poets who were on the faculty. But they were only cues and actually more like the crudely drawn treasure maps depicted in classic Errol Flynn-type adventure films that promise great fortunes but with a vague sense of finding “X marks the spot.”

Young readers of the Newsletter probably don’t recognize Laurie Price’s name as she has been out of this country for many years. For that absence/exile, you can put the blame on New Jersey. After a childhood in Flushing, Queens, her family relocated to Hillsdale, NJ—a great place for normies-in-training but terribly inhospitable for a budding poet and visual artist. She left home as a teenager and by 1993 became “a citizen of the world,” living in Spain, Morocco, and finally Mexico—most recently in Oaxaca with a poet-appropriate black cat.

Price writes poems of deft construction, always shifting, changing lanes, and by turns funny and wise with the strong sense of an author down in the engine room. There is also a bit of Jean-Luc Godard hovering about the premises, with several references to the process of writing, such as a poem titled “The Yesterday Sentence Looks Perfect Now, Thank You,” as well as the terrific “Skewered With Dis-Ease I Made Notes”:

There is so much going on in those eleven lines; it is sort of a soft shoe Ars Poetica. Head music vs life out the window plus a tip of the hat towards the human condition. As the title of her book implies, these poems are not running the changes through an experimentalist fake book—--they are, as we would say on my side of the Hudson, “the real deal.” Reading Price during these hard times recalls my fellow Jerseyan Kenneth Burke, who noted: “Poetry is produced ... as part of the consolatio philosophiae. It is undertaken as equipment for living, as a ritualistic way of arming us to confront perplexities and risks. It would protect us.” The act of engaging with the multiple landscapes of Price’s poetry can “protect” the reader, albeit briefly, against the damage of daily living. It is a poetry fully invested in our everyday life in the modern world and not with the lethal tedium of literary immortality.