NowhereFast Format: TradePaperback

Nowhere Fast offers a view of a world where fools rush in only to be baffled by ordinary dramas—of sexuality and gender, of family, of death and dying. By turns rueful, sardonic and tender, these narratives are overseen by a joyous mockery which reveals to us what Allen Ginsberg once called our quintessential “jerkhood”—to be living in a realm where satisfaction is denied and expectations are frustrated—the heart and soul of the absurd. In sixty exquisite prose poems, memory, dream and fantasy take turns animating the many identities of the “I” in a dark comedy of manners where the surreal underscores our eternal condition. In turns jocular and menacing, masculine and vulnerable, bawdy and rueful, Nowhere Fast marks the debut collection of a poet it seems we’ve always been waiting for.

WILLIAM KULIK’s translations of French Surrealist poetry are well-known, especially his versions of Robert Desnos, Tristan Tzara and Max Jacob. His most recent book is The Voice of Robert Desnos: Selected Poems (Sheep Meadow Press, 2005). He is in the process of finishing the first book-length selections in English of the work of the Belgian poet Paul Nougé. Nowhere Fast is the first collection of his own poetry, which has appeared in American Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, and Best American Poetry 1999.