Tasting the Dark (Paperback)

Since the first collection of poems appeared in 1972, George Amabile has quietly become one of our country’s most accomplished poets. Tasting the Dark presents a choice selection of his best work over the years and a substantial collection of his new poems. These are poems that open up and reach out, hungry to taste their fill of light as well as darkness, to taste grief and joy and rage and beauty ― and to speak of it all with eloquent and sensuous precision. Selected poems include Amabile’s deeply moving and now famous elegy “Accidental Death,” the shocking childhood memoir “First Kill,” the complete suite of his lyrical “Anima” poems, and numerous other works. By turns funny, profound, and heartbreaking, this collection is hot with passion for life. The new poems collected here show Amabile at the height of his powers. Amabile observes his world with a combination of fierce wit and powerful tenderness, all shot through with magical imagery in the glass antlers of iced branches in winter, a child dancing to the music of a waterfall, a flock of red balloons cut loose by a machete.

George Amabile is a poet and writer from Winnipeg, Manitoba. He has published fourteen books and has had his work published in over a hundred national and international venues. He has won awards in the CAA National Prize, the CBC Literary Competition, the Petra Kenney International Competition, the MAC national poetry contest, and the National Magazine Awards. His most recent publications are Small Change (Libros Libertad, 2011), Dancing, with Mirrors (Porcupine's Quill, 2011), Martial Music (Signature Editions, 2016) all of which won Bressani a