The Sleep of Reason

Poetry. Morri Creech's third collection of poems, THE SLEEP OF REASON, is a lyrical examination of liminal states of consciousness and experience — the shadowy terrain between sleep and waking, dream and nightmare, life and death, history and the present moment. Including both a surprising take on Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" and a dark meditation on the perils of the sublime, THE SLEEP OF REASON explores the anxieties, horrors, and dreams that flash just beneath the surface of the waking mind, combining formal elegance and an acknowledgment of literary tradition with a fresh, contemporary voice.

"It's a rare thing in this day and age to encounter a poet unafraid to think out loud and, moreover, one who possesses the lyric gifts and intellectual savvy to translate those thoughts into the material realities of everyday life. Formal and mimetic, elegiac and acerbic, equally at home with a painting from the Dutch Golden Age and the circus sprawl of popular culture, THE SLEEP OF REASON is as accomplished and intrepid a book of poems as one is likely to find." —Sherod Santos

"Situations in these poems are 'ordinary,' a man, say, at the start of a day, looking in a mirror, looking out a window, carrying out the trash, having a job, having a family, having a self, and wondering how it is doing, wondering what his future and his past and this day are; and writing about these things in beautiful expressive lines of verse, faithful measured lines with their varied subtle pressures and subtle cadences, responsive to the variety of pressures and cadences of the thoughts and feelings of the life being lived." —David Ferry

Morri Creech was born in Moncks Corner, South Carolina, USA, in 1970 and was educated at Winthrop University and McNeese State University. He is the author of three collections of poetry, Paper Cathedrals(Kent State University Press, 2001) FIELD KNOWLEDGE (Waywiser, 2006), which received the Anthony Hecht Poetry prize and was nominated for both the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Poet's Prize, and THE SLEEP OF REASON (Waywiser, 2013), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. A recipient of NEA and Ruth Lilly Fellowships, as well as grants from the North Carolina and Louisana Arts councils, he is the Writer in Residence at Queens University of Charlotte, where he teaches courses in both the undergraduate creative writing program and in the low residency MFA program. He lives in Charlotte, North Carolina with his wife and two children.