Backwards Days (Penguin Poets)

Another set of antidotal lyrics and story-poems from Stuart Dischell Sly, comic, inventive, and exuberant, the brokenhearted lyrics and dark parables of Backwards Days are cast in the spirit and craft Stuart Dischells poetry is known for. In this, his fourth full-length collection, he revs up both music and experience and writes startling poems of emotional intensity that chronicle the restlessness of desire. Sometimes grim, ever buoyant and hopeful, even in the most sorrowful or macabre situations, the poems of Backwards Days are most particularly about the movement of time, physical movement, and the movement of the heart. Through landscapes both real and of the psyche, they live on the edge of an elusive understanding never quite gotten right.

Stuart Dischell's work has appeared in many publications, including The New Republic, Partisan Review, and Ploughshares. He has been awarded the Pushcart Prize and a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Literature. He teaches at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.