Afterimage

Afterimage, by Len Krisak, is a masterfully-crafted collection of poems in which we see the persistence of history into the present - the ancient market under the polish of urban architecture, the thrum of Roman crowds amid present-day Boston. Horace and Ovid exist alongside Jeopardy! and Clark Kent. Whether in a grand, public mode or quietly elegiac and personal, the poems record our contemporary life, often noting the images from such a distant and literary past strikingly alive in the present. From "the topless towers of Troy" to "the trolley's stair step lip," Krisak writes with a metrical and formal eloquence. His voice is both learned and colloquial, demonstratating a careful attention to language and its power to move us.

Len Krisak has taught at Brandeis University, Northeastern University, and Stonehill College. His two chapbooks, Midland and Fugitive Child, came out in 1999 from Somers Rocks Press and Aralia Press, respectively. In 2000, his full-length collection Even as We Speak won the Richard Wilbur Prize and was published by the University of Evansville Press. In 2004, If Anything appeared from WordTech Editions; in 2006, Carcanet published his Odes of Horace, a complete translation; and in 2010 his complete translation of Virgil s Eclogues was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. In 2014, his complete translation of Ovid s Amores and Ars Amatoria will appear from the University of Pennsylvania Press, his complete Catullus from Carcanet Press, and in 2015, his complete translation of Rilke s Neue Gedichte (New Poems) will be published by Boydell & Brewer. In addition to the Richard Wilbur Prize, he has received the Robert Penn Warren and Robert Frost Prizes, the Pinch Prize, a Los Angeles Poetry Festival Award, and numerous honors from the New England Poetry Club, which awarded Even as We Speak the Motton Book Prize. He is the former winner of the GoldPocket.com National Trivia Competition and is a four-time Champion on Jeopardy!