CAPRICORN IN FLUX Format: PB - PAPERBACK

Throughout Capricorn in Flux, Glaser's eleventh book of poetry, we hear that same voice, vivid and precise and crackling with verve and wit. To borrow a line from Robert Lowell, he is still "free-lancing out along the razor's edge." But this time, the sprightliness is shadowed by a darker perspective. Now in his early eighties, Glaser takes into account the diminishments and indignities of late age. Though he calls himself "Laureate of the bent vernacular and the slippery joke," he also cannot help but feel the encroachments of the concluding years: "The nervous pressure of what's next." Harboring what comforts are left―the arts, a new love, the cycle of the seasons―Glaser finds the resilience he needs as everything else fades away, that last flare of grace and energy, ever restless and exuberant: "The mind buried alive in the body."

Elton Glaser, a native of New Orleans, is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Akron, where he also directed the University of Akron Press and edited the Akron Series in Poetry. Glaser has published ten full-length collections of poetry, most recently Soul Patch, winner of the 2025 Off the Grid Poetry Prize. With William Greenway, he coedited I Have My Own Song for It: Modern Poems of Ohio (Akron, 2002). Among his awards are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council, the Iowa Poetry Award, the Crab Orchard Poetry Award, and the Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in the 1995, 1997, and 2000 editions of The Best American Poetry. He has also won a Pushcart Prize.