Eng 307-01 Fall 2011

"Ali's ghazals are contemporary and colloquial, deceptively simple, yet still grounded in tradition....Highly recommended."—Library Journal

The beloved Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali presents his own American ghazals. Calling on a line or phrase from fellow poets, Ali salutes those known and loved—W. S. Merwin, Mark Strand, James Tate, and more—while in other searingly honest verse he courageously faces his own mortality.

Winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize

Everyday mindreading, a house full of Buddhas, and the papaya scent of the soul. An interview with Custer at a place of his choosing, "probably a steakhouse." The ability of dogs to smell the uncool.

Hitler's barber imagines what might have been if only he'd leaned his weight into the razor. An oblivious Coronado narrowly avoids an ambush on the American plains. Freud lecherously lifts the skirt of a Mexican housekeeper who has far too much work to be bothered by "a pillar of modern thought. Or just some dirty old man."

In lesser hands such disparate elements might fly wildly out of control. But in David Shumate's understated, brilliant prose poems, they come together in miraculously vivid riffs.

The narrator of the title poem rhapsodizes, "I wouldn't mind seeing another good flood before I die. It's been dry for decades. Next time I think I'll just let go and drift downstream and see where I end up." Shumate's deft and refreshing collection takes us to amazing places.

"Fearless hybridization.... Jordan creates spaces where physics and poetry, comic books and jazz, memory and loss, come together."—American Prospect This ambitious collection explores the intersection of the infinite world of physics with the perplexities of the human condition. Employing both narrative and cinematic structure, Jordan re-creates the lives of Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and comic book superheroes—the Green Lantern, the Atom—and also reveals himself in poems of recollection and loss.

"Ali's ghazals are contemporary and colloquial, deceptively simple, yet still grounded in tradition....Highly recommended."—Library Journal

The beloved Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali presents his own American ghazals. Calling on a line or phrase from fellow poets, Ali salutes those known and loved—W. S. Merwin, Mark Strand, James Tate, and more—while in other searingly honest verse he courageously faces his own mortality.

"Fearless hybridization.... Jordan creates spaces where physics and poetry, comic books and jazz, memory and loss, come together."—American Prospect

This ambitious collection explores the intersection of the infinite world of physics with the perplexities of the human condition. Employing both narrative and cinematic structure, Jordan re-creates the lives of Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and comic book superheroes—the Green Lantern, the Atom—and also reveals himself in poems of recollection and loss.