The Apprentice of Fever (Wick Poetry First Book) - Hardcover

Tayson, Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0873386140 ISBN 13: 9780873386142

Publisher: The Kent State University Press, 1998

Synopsis

Winner of the 1997 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize “The Apprentice of Fever is a brilliantly corporeal first book…rooted in the day-to-day life of a man implicated in the AIDS epidemic, living on the edge, crossing, transforming and transgressing boundaries, always, always paying an extreme and active attention, which is the apotheosis of compassion, which is an act of love…” “Tayson’s voice is unmistakable: direct, witty, passionate and desperate, in poems with the crucial acid to etch themselves into the reader’s consciousness.” ―from the Introduction by Marilyn Hacker, Judge

About this title

About the Author

Richard Tayson’s other awards include a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, Prairie Schooner’s Edward Stanley Award, and a Pushcart Prize. Tayson’s co-authored book of non-fiction, Look Up for Yes (1998), appeared on bestseller lists in Germany, and has been included in Reader’s Digest’s Today’s Best Nonfiction in the United States, Germany and Australia. His second book of poems, The World Underneath (Kent State University Press, 2008), was released in 2008. Tayson lives in Queens, New York.

Reviews

Marilyn Hacker picked this debut for the press Wick Award a collection by a New York poet she admires for his supposedly transgressive focus on things corporeal and for his passionate discussion of his homosexuality and his lovers demise by AIDS. With Taysons attention to the etiology of disease and his autobiographical sex tales, the volume adds up to yet one more memoir from the history of an epidemic. The poets apparent self-loathing and his survivors guilt seem conventions within the genre, which he seldom transcends in these clear but formally uninspired verses. The best rely on indirection and deviate from the straight-forward AIDS narrative: Phone Sex splices the recordings heard on a sex line with memories of an affair with a married man and proclaims the poets unabashed lust (I love all mens cocks); Love as an Argument in Time and Loss imagines ancient Greek lovers; and the seven-part Sacraments, with its clever variation on Psalm 23, mixes Christian imagery with personal memory and eroticizes the poets boyhood Christ. Elsewhere, Tayson remembers fearing Gods wrath (The Gift) and experiencing separation from both God and family (First Sex), only to find spiritual ecstasy in sex (The Ascension), especially in anal penetration (Sacred Anus). The many poems about his now-dead lover and the course of his illness pose an obvious challenge: to say anything negative would seem misanthropic and incorrect. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0873386140
• ISBN 13: 9780873386142
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 72