Who would guess that Godzilla, the Invisible Man, Elvis, Donald Duck, Ted Williams, and the Three Stooges might have something to say about the love and loss that shape the way we see the world? And yet these are the pop-culture coordinates that chart the emotional life brilliantly mapped out in Paul Guest's second book of poems. Winner of the Prairie Schooner Prize in Poetry, this collection plumbs the depths of nature and culture (how, for instance, "gar" in Old English means "spear," and an octopus can lose a limb during mating) to give form to the darkness and the light that make us human. In poetry whose tone is largely one of lament tempered by a wry and intelligent humor, Paul Guest does what a poet does best: he gives us the moments of his life refashioned to reflect the larger arc and meaning of our own--of life, that is, writ large.
Paul Guest is the author of The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World, winner of the 2002 New Issues Poetry Prize, and of the chapbook Exit Interview. Coeditor of Mot Juste, Guest has taught poetry and writing at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and the University of Alabama.
Nothing
Plenitude
Elba
On Being Asked Who the You Is in My Poems
Questions for Godzilla
The Invisible Man Looks into a Mirror
Beyond Repair
Minus
History
Psalm in Rain
Romance
Negation
At Last
The Naked
Daydreaming of Ghosts
The God of Neglect, Overheard
From the Black Lagoon
How It Won't Be
Seduction with Entropy
Veneration
Apologia
In Praise of the Defective
Exit Interview
Resignation
The Cartoonist in Hell
My Philosophy of Other Lives
Donald Duck's Lament
Popular Romance
These Arms of Mine
Such as Myself
Poem for the National Hobo Association Poetry Contest
Notes for My Body Double
Questions for Silence
For a Woman's Back
Ode
Perfume
Erasure
Concern
Poem in which I Seek Consolation in the Etymology of a Word
Hunger
The Numbers Are Not In
Love Poem
Water
Ptolemaic Sunset
Lullaby
Garden