Early Creatures, Native Gods (Carnegie Mellon Poetry) - Softcover

Hays, K. A.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0887485472 ISBN 13: 9780887485473

Publisher: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2012

Synopsis

Early Creatures, Native Gods follows K. A. Hays's debut collection of poetry, Dear Apocalypse (2009). As the speaker of the new collection alternately renounces and longs for faith, the landscape shifts from the cathedrals of Emilia-Romagna to the severe coastline of Lubec, Maine. Here the earth's "mindless forces" are addressed as deities: "I'm telling / you--for whom / all wars and ages / are a day's grind-- / to go on grinding."

About this title

About the Author:

K. A. Hays is a poet, fiction writer, and verse translator whose work has appeared in such publications as Hudson Review, American Poetry Review, Southern Review, and the Best American Poetry series. She is the author of a previous book of poetry, Dear Apocalypse (2009). Hays studied literature and writing at Bucknell, Oxford, and Brown universities, and currently lives in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

Review:

These poems reveal a serious poet grappling with serious things, like faith and doubt . . . Hays refuses the stuttering reflexive mannerisms common in the current-contemporary style . . . as well as the ever-present romantic urge to chuck rationality and rely on the obscurities of emotion. She maintains intellectual control and restraint, her themes are important and universal, her phrasing is often sententious, her diction is pure, simple, and as austere as her imagination, and she accurately apprehends experience and conveys it as precisely as possible in free verse.

--Rick Joines in American Literary Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Carnegie Mellon University Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0887485472
• ISBN 13: 9780887485473
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 72