Incarnate Format: Paperback

The Dead Man, Marvin Bell’s brilliant poetic invention, is an overarching consciousness, alive and dead at once, defeating time. Mystical and anonymous, The Dead Man offers searing insight into the joys, as well as the catastrophes, of fluctuating cultural and political moments. Incarnate draws from all of Bell’s previous collections where The Dead Man appeared, and adds an abundant cache of new poems that resonate with “the dark matter and sticky stuff” of life. As David St. John writes in his introduction, “No voice in our poetry has spoken with more eloquence and wisdom of the daily spiritual, political and psychological erosion in our lives; no poet has gathered our American experience with a more capacious tenderness―all the while naming and celebrating our persistent hopes and enduring human desires….Remarkable for its eclectic and culturally diverse vision, Incarnate embodies a vivid world of poetic reflection unlike anything else in American poetry.”

Marvin Bell was born in New York City 1937, and raised in rural Long Island. He attended Alfred University and the University of Chicago. He enjoyed a long teaching career at the University of Iowa, where he influenced generations of poets and was the Flannery O’Connor Professor of Letters. Bell has published twenty-one volumes of poetry and served as Iowa’s first Poet Laureate. He lives in Iowa City, Iowa and Port Townsend, Washington.