L. S. Asekoff's Freedom Hill is a dramatic monologue divided into three sections. The first concerns the speaker's visit with his aging parents and the death of his father. The second, set at an art party, is a meditation on women, desire, and the nature of the self. In the third, we witness the effects on the speaker of a cerebral stroke, along with his gradual recovery. As readers of Asekoff's unique body of work have come to expect, this highly allusive poem encompasses a wide range of subject matter: Heidegger, C-SPAN, modern art, aging, capitalism, religion. Also familiar will be Asekoff's great variety of tone and verbal ingenuity. Although indebted to high modernism, Freedom Hill is an ambitious, thoroughly contemporary meditation on issues very much of the present.
L. S. Asekoff, former director of the Brooklyn College MFA Program in Poetry, has published three previous poetry collections: Dreams of a Work (1994), North Star (1997), and The Gate of Horn (Northwestern University Press, 2010). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, the American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, Ninth Letter, and other publications.
"Highly wrought and eclectic, Louis Asekoff?s Freedom Hill is boisterous with energy and ambitious with materials; Asekoff is a strange and brilliant poet, and this is an intellectually passionate, vigorous and culturally relevant poem."
Tony Hoagland