(Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award)
by D. A. Powell
Critics love his work. The more avant-garde poetry lovers among us love his work. You will, too, unless you’re more into the more staid, iambic pentameter, rhyming poetry. Then this book won’t be quite your cup ‘o tea. This poetry is typically edgy…like all Powell’s work. –D. L. Keur, The Deepening World of Books
AVAILABLE IN HARDCOVER & PAPERBACK FROM AMAZON.COM
ABOUT THIS POETRY BOOK
The first poetry collection by D. A. Powell since his remarkable trilogy of Tea, Lunch, and Cocktails, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
so many of the best days seem minor forms of nearness
that easily falls among the dropseed: a rind, a left-behind
—from “no picnic”
In these brilliant new poems from one of contemporary poetry’s most intriguing, singular voices, D. A. Powell strikes out for the farther territories of love and comes back from those fields with loss, with flowers faded, “blossom blast and dieback.” Chronic describes the flutter and cruelty of erotic encounter, temptation, and bitter heartsickness, but with Powell’s deep lyric beauty and his own brand of dark wit.
- Hardcover: 64 pages
- Publisher: Graywolf Press (February 17, 2009)
- Language: English
ABOUT THE POET
Considered by some an experimental poet, Powell mixes both conventional and non-conventional techniques. For example, his early poems do not have titles; the first lines serve as the poems’ working titles. He also does not capitalize the first letter of a new sentence. In this sense, he is reminiscent of E. E. Cummings; however Powell’s poems are more edgy. His work often moves back and forth between popular culture like movies and music and more complicated themes like religion and AIDS; he uses numerous rhetorical devices, especially puns, as bridges between these two spheres of experience. Powell’s first three books of poems are considered a kind of trilogy on the AIDS epidemic.
Writing in the New York Times, critic Stephen Burt said of Powell’s work, “No accessible poet of his generation is half as original, and no poet as original is this accessible.”
ABOUT THIS NEW POETRY BOOK
Home is where you start from, but where is a swallow’s real home? And what does ‘native’ mean if the English oak is an immigrant from Spain? In ninety richly varied poems and illuminating prose interludes, Ruth Padel’s original new book weaves science, myth, wild nature and human history to conjure a world created and sustained by migration. ‘We’re all from somewhere else”, she begins, tracing the millennia-old journeys of cells, trees, birds and beasts. Geese battle raging winds over Mount Everest, lemurs skim precipices in Madagascar and wildebeest, at the climax of their epic trek from Tanzania, brave a river filled with the largest, hungriest crocodiles in Africa. Human migration has shaped civilisation but today is one of the greatest challenges the world faces. In a series of incisive portraits, Padel turns to the struggles of human displacement – the Flight into Egypt, John James Audubon emigrating to America (feeding migrant birds en route), migrant workers in Mumbai and refugees labouring over a drastically changing planet – to show how the purpose of migration, for both humans and animals, is survival. Poignant, thought-provoking and utterly compelling, here is a magnificent tapestry of life on the move from the acclaimed author of “Darwin: A Life in Poems”.