Poetry. WE ARE PHARAOH is the debut collection from Robert Fernandez, native of Miami, recipient of a PIP Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry, and resident of Iowa City. Like a fever or a fire, this book sweeps across our contemporary cultural landscape, setting aglow and surveying its elements, then cataloging the embers.
"WE ARE PHARAOH is a luscious saturnalia of language, adapting New York School painterliness to an erotic tropical sensibility: 'A mandrill clutching the throat in the billiard hall of Pele.' Its magic raises the pulse."—Ange Mlinko
Author City: IOWA CITY, IA USA
Robert Fernandez is the author of WE ARE PHARAOH (2011) and PINK REEF (2013), both published by Canarium Books. He was selected as a New American Poet by the Poetry Society of America and won a PIP Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry. A native of Miami, he lives in Iowa City.
Reviews and Other Links
Publishers Weekly
interview by Zach Savich @ THERMOS
Bethany Prosseda @ HTMLGIANT
featured New American Poet @ Poetry Society of America
Vanessa Villarreal @ the Center for Literary Publishing
Eric Rawson @ Drunken Boat
“In the tragic recognition—(or barbaric imperial yawp?)—of its title, WE ARE PHARAOH refuses to disavow the poet’s imbrication within the collective nightmare of modernity. Here, Fernandez uncovers the terrible beauty and truth of our first-person plural condition: ‘the voice stark, near-black, mutely blue, a Portland Vase across which cameo jackals tangle.’ This startling work turns a new page on the poetry of our historical moment.”
—Srikanth Reddy
“Robert Fernandez writes the poetry of a lavish daytime, the record of an inexhaustible world. How generative the gathering of ideas, the assembly of blessings in the form of a visible ‘train from Sharm el-Sheikh,’ where the air gives to each thing an exact place, a name-rhythm, but only for the moment, because myriad possibilities exist to recall.”
—Mark McMorris