By Jason Gray
“Jason Gray’s gift is quiet but profound. He brings the same respectful eye to nature as to acts of art — an eye that adds its own light to the occasions. A book for delectation.”
Heather McHugh, final judge
“(Gray’s) verse is the evident product of a disciplined mind, and it is even, more frequently than one might expect, beautiful.”
Pleiades
“Few poets are more with it than Jason Gray. It is better than that: he is equally at home with the urban and the ‘natural,’ the present and the past. He is enabled by a secure but unobtrusive technique.... His phrasing can be startling without being freakish. It is the rightness that startles.”
Turner Cassity
“Photographing Eden is a book of postlapsarian poems intent not on naming the creatures of a new world, but on naming—and thus trying to reclaim—the losses of this one. By turns dark and whimsical, these poems offer field guides and museum tours, photographs and paintings, of our mythological prehistory and our shadowy future.”
A. E. Stallings
Photographing Eden presents the first full-length collection of poems by a major new talent. The work meditates on several ideas, the crux of which is Eden: spirituality, environmentalism, and the relationships between men and women. Observing, often through the lens of a camera, our state in the world, the poems try to focus sharply on what often seems a blur. The poems are always attentive to artistic mediums and the craft behind them because our struggle is to make something perfect in the imperfect world in which we live, while acknowledging the impossibility of that quest. Gray’s poems range all over, from adventures in Egyptian ruins with machine-gun-toting tourist police to the western edge of the foggy Irish coastline, and to the mythic past, where Adam and Eve visit a zoo and Eden has become a nature preserve.
Jason Gray is the author of two chapbooks of poetry, How to Paint the Savior Dead, winner of the Wick Chapbook Award, and Adam & Eve Go to the Zoo. His poems and reviews have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Southern Review, and elsewhere. He coedits the online literary journal Unsplendid, www.unsplendid.com. More info →
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978-0-8214-1836-9
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Release date: December 2008
72 pages
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Rights: World
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978-0-8214-1835-2
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Electronic
978-0-8214-4301-9
Release date: December 2008
Rights: World
The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets
Edited by David Yezzi
·
Foreword by J. D. McClatchy
Groundbreaking anthologies of this kind come along once in a generation and, in time, define that generation. The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets identifies a group of poets who have recently begun to make an important mark on contemporary poetry, and their accomplishment and influence will only grow with time. The poets gathered here do not constitute a school or movement; rather they are a group of unique artists working at the top of their craft.
One Unblinking Eye
Poems
By Norman Williams
The poems in One Unblinking Eye cast a steady and serious gaze at life outside the beltways. Whether testifying at a prayer meeting in Indiana, tramping the backwoods of northern New England, or working on an oil derrick in the Gulf, the inhabitants of these poems live on the margins of society. “They are the left-behind, odd-manneredones/Who speak in starts,” Norman Williams writes of the last residents of a West Virginia mining town.
Infinite Morning
Poems
By Meredith Carson
About the author of this award-winning collection, final judge Miller Williams commented:“Meredith Carson writes poems so well-controlled in tone that the language of conversation takes on an elegance rarely found in contemporary poetry, but emphatically contemporary.”In this, her first collection of poetry, Meredith Carson combines form and feeling, human nature and animal instinct, a scientist’s eye and a poet’s heart to create poetry of detail and delight.From
No Second Eden
Poems
By Turner Cassity
If you think that Turner Cassity has mellowed or slowed down since the 1998 release of his selected poems, The Destructive Element, think again. In No Second Eden Cassity is back more Swiftian than ever. Among the targets reduced to ruin are countertenors, parole boards, the French Symbolists, calendar reformers, the Yale Divinity School, and the cult of Elvis. Without turning a blind eye, he even extends a toast to Wernher von Braun.Surprisingly,
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