Synopsis
Poetry. Winner of the 2010 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. In his splendid new collection, Mark Kraushaar addresses a tentative and awkward, sometimes funny though frequently heart-breaking struggle to find a path to meaning in the world, a task made more difficult still by the struggle itself. In Cake a man arriving too late for his own small birthday party, unable to cajole his exasperated and saddened wife and daughter into staying, watches them exit the diner in which the three have met, then finally opens a book. As the waitress approaches, the narrator asks, "And what in Hell is he reading?" Towards the end of Chiropractor Claims to Travel Through Time (a poem inspired by an AP story), the central character observes of his father, "He tried, I know, / but every evening / watching him watch the tv / I wondered what clues had eluded him. / Constricted, uncontent, incomplete, / what secret had he missed?"
"Once a student told me her father said that when older people cry, they're weeping because the world is beautiful—they already know it's sad. Mark Kraushaar's poems, too, look beyond the sorrow and find instead a world that's almost unbearably lovely. I fell hard for Falling Brick Kills Local Man, Kraushaar's first book; I have an even bigger crush on this one."—David Kirby
"A bell goes tolling over the landscape of Mark Kraushaar's THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE and its burden is Moment, moment... The word keeps recurring in this engrossing collection. Kraushaar sometimes seems temperamentally as much short story writer as poet (something to be regretted only by those who would keep poetry pure of life's muddy complexities), and many of his poems offer rich, beguiling, abbreviated narratives. The book abounds in character revelations perhaps too modest to be called epiphanies—but moments, even so, whose unlikely glimmerings are welcome and illuminating."—Brad Leithauser
"Mark Kraushaar's THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE is the best counterargument to the specious claim that narrative poetry is either old fashioned, 'linear' or predictably 'conventional.' These poems have all the excitement and complexity of life as we live it now, together with a depth of speculation that is positively stunning in the light it casts on the intimate nooks and crannies of social experience that all of us encounter but either fail to notice or find words for. The sensation of time is Kraushaar's ultimate subject, but he approaches time so imaginatively, so freshly, through such a detailed range of voices and occasions, in poems that unfold in such surprising yet inevitable ways that one feels as if every other possible subject for a poem—love, death, the struggles of dailiness, the fear of loss, friendship and work, childhood, contingency, and lack of faith—has been woven into the netting of this one obsession. This is a book to be enjoyed and savored, to be read with pleasure and gratitude, to be learned by heart."—Alan Shapiro
About the Author
Kraushaar was born in Washington DC and grew up outside Boston in Concord, Massachusetts. He attended Marlboro College in Vermont, where he studied literature and writing, worked briefly as a high school English teacher, then as a cab driver in Boston. After this, he moved to London for two years and travelled in Europe. Back in the States he lived for a time in New York City and again in Boston. He attended trade school in Louisville, Kentucky, worked as a welder on the coal and grain barges on the Mississippi and then moved to the state of Mississippi, where he worked as a pipe welder at Ingalls Shipbuilding. He moved to Wisconsin after two years at the shipyard, worked in construction as a pipe welder but found this was "definitively not my dish" and so went to nursing school in Madison, Wisconsin. He has worked as an RN in Madison since the mid-80s. His work has appeared in the Hudson Review, Ploughshares, Alaska Review, Gettysburg Review, as well as Best American Poetry, and the website Poetry Daily. He has been featured in the Missouri Review as well as Michigan Quarterly and has been a recipient of Poetry Northwest's Richard Hugo Award. He is the author of THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE (The Waywiser Press, 2011). A previous collection, Falling Brick Kills Local Man, was a finalist for the May Swenson Award, the Juniper Prize and the Walt Whitman Award, and was published in 2009 by the University of Wisconsin Press as winner of the Felix Pollak Prize.
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