Strange What Rises - Softcover

Whitehead, Gary J

Softcover

ISBN 10: 194789613X ISBN 13: 9781947896130

Publisher: Terrapin Books, 2019

Synopsis

Departing from the more whimsical tone of A Glossary of Chickens, Whitehead's last book, this new collection explores, among other subjects, childlessness in middle age, the vicissitudes of divorce, the pain of parental aging, and the mystery of mortality. Laden with regret and misgiving, but illuminated by glimmers of hopefulness and joy, the poems flow organically and without sections, one building on the other with thematic or linguistic links, moving from silence to song, from a corrupted flower to "the force / of the crossing when the humming ceases."

About this title

About the Author

Gary J. Whitehead's poems have been published in journals, magazines, and newspapers. His third book of poetry, A Glossary of Chickens, was chosen by Paul Muldoon for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets and published in 2013 by Princeton University Press. His work has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Guardian's Poem of the Week, the BBC's Words and Music program, and American Life in Poetry. Awards for his poetry include the Anne Halley Prize from The Massachusetts Review, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and the Pearl Hogrefe Fellowship at Iowa State University. He has been a featured poet at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, the Princeton Poetry Festival, and the West Caldwell Poetry Festival, and has held residencies at Blue Mountain Center, Mesa Refuge, the Heinrich Böll Cottage, and Marble House Project. He teaches English at Tenafly High School in northern New Jersey.

Review

... not one syllable out of sync. This poetry is acoustically perfect and intellectually honest--two things seldom found together. He reveals--by way of location, sound, and visuals--an arc within each story where we learn what is beautiful. I would encourage students of poetry to read this book for its foundationality in what poetry can be. This poet can be a motivator for writers.
    --Grace Cavalieri, Washington Independent Review of Books

While much of America is roiling with heady hysterias, along comes Whitehead with quiet, observational poems that impale the heart. "All at once you're out of love again," he says, "and it's like the earth has jerked on its axis"--gorgeous, lapidary lines that have clearly risen from the earth, through the poet, through heart and brain, and, in every poem, established a newfound state of strange grace and shrewd balance. These poems are not soft and harmless; don't for a minute, expect that. They're energies that establish the ground we all rise from, and they give us a place to stand while we watch his "hanged man kick the air."
     --Renée Ashley, The View from the Body

It is such a pleasure to sit with Gary J. Whitehead's latest book, Strange What Rises, as these meditations continually search for the profound with deep attentiveness, whether in moments of stillness or in moments of tumult. I was hooked from the very first poem, "Wild Columbine." Here is a keen eye for the lyric sweep of a poem braided with a narrative propulsion. Whitehead never averts his gaze, whether in service to beauty or in witness to the painful. He says, "Let me raise the storms," and he does just that, with "an avian choir, / days with repeating phrases, // whole summers of arias." 
     --Brian Turner, Phantom Noise

About this edition

• Publisher: Terrapin Books
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 194789613X
• ISBN 13: 9781947896130
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 94
• Editor: Lockward Diane