Poetry. LGBT Studies. PART OF THE BARGAIN, winner of the Hayden Carruth Award and selected form nearly 1,000 entries is both a cabinet of curiosities and a sweep of philosophical idylls. Hightower's poems range in style and subject, with soliloquies, laments, eccentric ponderings, and contemplations of appetite and art. The book's epigraph evokes a Faustian contract, which is echoed in the tensions between urban and rural, light and dark, moral and amoral action. Hightower's influences—Sappho, Virgil, Blake, and Wilde—make their presence known as he reflects upon life in urban America after growing up in rural Texas, about coming of age as a gay man, about art and artists, poetry and painting. PART OF THE BARGAIN also explores the imperceptible reconciliations that one makes as an individual, a part of a community, and as a conscientious heir to a culture.

Author City: NEW YORK, NY USA

Scott Hightower teaches as an adjunct faculty at NYU and Drew University. A native of central Texas, Hightower lives in Manhattan and sojourns in Spain. His translations of poems by the Spanish-Puerto Rican poet Aurora de Albornoz garnered Hightower a prestigious Willis Barnstone Translation Prize. He is the author of four books of poetry, including PART OF THE BARGAIN (Copper Canyon Press, 2005) and SELF-EVIDENT (Barrow Street Press, 2012). His poems have appeared in the Yale Review, Salmagundi, Ploughshares, AGNI, The Paris Review, New England Review, Southwest Review, Gulf Coast and many others.

Reviews and Other Links
author site
Carl Rosenstock @ Tarpaulin Sky Reviews