The Most Natural Thing. This item is unavailable.The Most Natural Thing

Poetry. THE MOST NATURAL THING is like a series of x-rays—symmetrical square boxes made of language, in which language is describing the anatomy of one body, and this body becomes a container of information about science, myth, memory, history, and dream. Think about a community of trees all sharing one clump of tangled roots underground, a kind of heart—though above ground they seem to be separate entities. The book looks at what is separate on the surface and tries throughout to find that tangled heart.

David Keplinger is the author of three books of poetry, most recently The Clearing (2005) andThe Prayers of Others (New Issues, 2006), which won the 2007 Colorado Book Award.He is the recipient of an NEA fellowship, grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the SOROS Foundation, and the T.S. Eliot Prize. In 2011 BOA, Ltd. published House Inspections, his translations of Danish poet Carsten René Nielsen, and in 2007 World Cut out with Crooked Scissors, Nielsen’s selected poems, appeared from New Issues Press.Keplinger directs the MFA program in Creative Writing at American University in Washington, D.C.