Flying Over Sonny Liston: Poems (Western Literature and Fiction Series) - Softcover

Short, Gary

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0874172853 ISBN 13: 9780874172850

Publisher: University of Nevada Press, 1996

Synopsis

Winner of the 1996 Western States Book Award for poetry, Flying Over Sonny Liston explores with courage, compassion, and bone-deep wisdom the complicated and sometimes heartbreaking task of being human in the modern West. Whether he writes about the tortuous interior landscape of the family or the abused terrain of the Nevada desert, Gary Short is unfailingly honest, tender, and gifted with a vision for the all-revealing detail, the larger, wrenching truth. Although many of the poems are about death or express a deep and painful anger, the book is about survival. We often find in these poems a movement from the dark into a blazing light of realization that acts as a counter to sorrow, from comprehension to forgiveness, and an awareness that the daunting challenge of being human is won not in loud victories but through the delicate graces of mercy, trust, and hope.

About this title

From the Back Cover

Winner of the Western States Book Award for poetry, Flying Over Sonny Liston explores with courage, compassion, and bone-deep wisdom the complicated and some times heartbreaking task of being human in the modern world, in the modern West. Whether he writes about the tortuous interior landscape of the family or the vast and often abused terrain of the Nevada desert, Gary Short is unfailingly honest, tender, and gifted with a vision for the all-revealing detail, the larger, wrenching truth. Although many of the poems are about death or express a deep and painful anger, the book is about survival. We often find in these poems a movement from the dark into a blazing light of realization that acts as a counter to sorrow, from comprehension to forgiveness, and an awareness that the daunting challenge of being human is won not in loud victories but through the delicate graces of mercy, trust, and hope.

About the Author

Gary Shortis the author of10 Moons and 13 HorsesandFlying Over Sonny Liston, the latter winning the Western States Book Award for Poetry in 1996. He has been a writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and a Stegner Fellow at Stanford. Short has taught at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and at Old Dominion University in Virginia. He currently divides his time between Virginia City, Nevada, and Panajachel, Guatemala."

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0874172853
• ISBN 13: 9780874172850
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 80