Hands Collected: The Books of Simon Perchik

Poetry. This handsome landmark edition of Simon Perchik's poems from 1949 to 1999 also includes a complete bibliography. Let others jockey for position. Perchik's poems are obdurant and honest and will reach those that need them most -- James Tate. He makes dense and sometimes brutal poems with all the implicit tenderness of a full man -- Paul Blackburn. Simon Perchik is widely and regularly published in many periodicals including The New Yorker, The Nation, Partisan Review, Massachusetts Review, and Southern Poetry Review. This is his seventeenth collection of poetry.

With only one of Simon Perchik's 16 previous small-press releases in print, Hands Collected: The Books of Simon Perchik gives the work of Patterson, New Jersey's latter-day poetic son a more permanent form. Readers will find his signature use of the colon (" only the moon :hope/ carved into each gravestone") much in evidence in poems from I Counted Only April (1964) to These Hands Filled with Numbness (1996) and through to new work, "again a brush sealing this boat/ as wings covered with sun/ sweeter than milk and lush sugar oil."

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