Description
Literary Nonfiction. In these hybrid writings—a mixture of memoir, prose poetry, personal essay, travel journal, and spiritual meditation—Stephen Kessler synthesizes a lifetime of experiences in language of extraordinary concentration, vividness, and lyricism. The stories he tells and the visions he evokes of places and people he has known could be anyone's, but they are the distillation of a singular personal history in a voice uniquely his own.
"Stephen Kessler's WHERE WAS I? consists of brief meditations, musings, and reminiscences on place, presence, and the passing of time. They are astonishing reflections on how the past resurfaces in the present, lending a new dimension for which we have no name, where the here and now is framed by what was, where memory is transposed by imagination, and where experiencethrough the spell of art is alchemized into eternal moments.In page after page of this amazing book, Kessler celebrates andmourns our mortal world. These pieces re-vision a lifetime ofluminous and fugitive experiences; they are a thanksgiving andpraise to a life well-lived coupled with an artistic intelligence that appreciates and celebrates its wonders."—Joseph Stroud
Author Bio
Stephen Kessler is a poet, prose writer, translator and editor. Born in Los Angeles in 1947, he received his BA in languages and literature from Bard College and an MA in literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He published his first essays and criticism in the early 1970s, and his reviews, columns, articles, features and interviews have appeared steadily since then in dozens of magazines and newspapers, chiefly in Northern California. He was the founding editor and publisher of the international journal Alcatraz (1979-1985) and of the Santa Cruz newsweekly The Sun (1986-1989). He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Lambda Literary Award, and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets for his translations of Luis Cernuda, and is the editor and principal translator of The Sonnets by Jorge Luis Borges. His recent books include NEED I SAY MORE? (El León Literary Arts, 2015), WHERE WAS I? (Greenhouse Review Press, 2015), the poetry collection SCRATCH PEGASUS (Swan Scythe Press, 2013), translations of Vicente Aleixandre, the essay collection THE TOLSTOY OF THE ZULUS (El León Literary Arts, 2011), and the novel THE MENTAL TRAVELER (Greenhouse Review Press, 2010).From 1999 through 2014 he was the editor of the award-winning literary newspaper The Redwood Coast Review. He lives in Santa Cruz.
Author City: SANTA CRUZ, CA USA