Synopsis
From the Foreword by Tyler Meier: To my ear, Michael Gessner’s oeuvre chimes distinctly and gorgeously with Merrillesque tones, but piqued with Auden’s love of the clear-eyed. This is a collection interested in way-finding across a life’s work; it is Keatsian in its capabilities, both of the negative sort and not. The range in what follows is some of the pleasure and basis for my associative comparisons and echoes; consider the great Parisian sequences from Transversales; the animal that gets at the animus in us all in Beast Book; the inclusiveness of the poems in Artificial Life, domestic, spectral occasions for wonder and the pleasure of a poetic intellect in full form. Surfaces brings ekphrasis to bear, reminding ultimately that the way we see a piece of art and the attention we pay it is perhaps the same attention and earnestness we owe the everyday world, this everyday museum of our lived experiences. Finally, the poems in Earthly Bodies are also the early bodies in the oeuvre, and many signal as beacons the concerns that filter throughout Gessner’s poetry: the domestic and the unfamiliar; the relationship between the banal and wonder; the shared public history of a place and the private moments that define our connections to spaces.
About the Author
Poems of Michael Gessner were selected in various competitions as finalists and semifinalists including "Discovery"/The Nation, the Pablo Neruda Award, and North American Review's James Hearst Poetry Prize. He has authored six collections of poetry, and his publications include work in American Letters & Commentary, American Literary Review, Ann Arbor Review, Asphodel, Atticus Review, Chiron Review, The French Literary Review, Innisfree, Journal of the American Medical Association, Kenyon Review, Nimrod, North American Review, Oxford Magazine, Pacific Review, Paterson Review, Poem, Rue des beaux-art (Paris,) Sycamore Review, The Yale Journal for Humanities, Verse Daily, Verse-Virtual, Wallace Stevens Journal, Web del Sol, Windhover, Wisconsin Review, and others. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, his reviews and articles have been published by Allyn & Bacon, C. V. Mosby, Times-Mirror, The Edgar Allan Poe Review, and the University of Pennsylvania's Jacket2. He is a voting member of the National Book Critics Circle, and has given invited readings and presentations at state poetry societies, chapters of the AAUW, nursing facilities, Casa Libre en la Solana, and various civic and literary organizations, colleges and universities including the University of Arizona, the American-Irish Historical Society (NYC,) University College Dublin, and Cambridge University. His work has been called "Striking" (David Barber, The Atlantic) and "Structurally ingenious" (Jonathan Galassi, Farrar, Straus & Giroux). He lives in Tucson, Arizona, with his wife and their dog, Irish.
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