Description
Poetry. A NIGHT IN DULUTH is an uncertain and often tongue-in-cheek dream in which the voice of the poet makes due, speaks to what is both lost and found—to the confusion of being in an American oligarchy where poverty is growing as fast as private prisons and every bowl of soup is likely to contain a fly. Weil imagines this Duluth as a sort of dark night of the soul in which hope and cynicism can be erased as easily as grease paint from the face of a performer. There are moments of tenderness and respite, but the surreal presence of the dead informs almost all the poems and the idea of pratfall, and dead pan, the acts of making due in a diminished life and surviving by a kind of comic-tragic shtick is all pervasive. Weil considers this his most difficult and honest book. It is a puppet theater in which most of the audience is comprised of ghosts.
Author Bio
Joe Weil is an Associate Professor at Binghamton University and a former tool grinder and union activist whose poems, stories, essays, quotations, interviews, and reviews have appeared in Onthebus, Poet Lore, Rattle, The Boston Review, Chicago Quarterly, Louisiana Review, Paterson Literary Review, Omniverse, Best American Poems Online, The New York Times, Verse Daily, and on the websites for the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. He is also widely anthologized, and his poems have been translated into Italian, Hungarian, Spanish, and Korean. He is the author of THE BACKWARDS YEAR (NYQ Books, 2020), A NIGHT IN DULUTH (NYQ Books, 2016), THE GREAT GRANDMOTHER LIGHT (NYQ Books, 2013), and THE PLUMBER'S APPRENTICE (NYQ Books, 2009). Weil has been featured on Pacifica Radio as well as on PBS and considers himself a performance artist who often combines poetry with story telling and music. He makes his home in Binghamton with his wife, the poet, Emily Vogel, and their two children, Clare and Gabriel.
Author City: BINGHAMTON, NY USA