Description
Poetry. LATE HUMAN is a collection of tragi-comic poems on lateness, belatedness, Weltschmerz, and borrowing (with a nod to Ernest Mandel's 1975 tome on the twilight of capitalism). The human of the title is multiple, personal, and drenched in the tears of the 21st century. Cracked children's rhymes lead onto an ethnography that takes Helen Mirren's first film appearance as seriously as Moby Dick. At the volume's center, three laments honor the "realism / that would send anyone to spasm," a sentiment that crests in the book's title poem before alighting, provisionally, in "Early Bird"—its dawn chorus.
Author Bio
Jean Day is a poet and editor. Her books include LATE HUMAN (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021), TRIUMPH OF LIFE (Insurance), DAYDREAM (Litmus), ENTHUSIASM (Adventures in Poetry), THE LITERAL WORLD (Atelos), The I and the You (Poets & Poets), A YOUNG RECRUIT (Roof), and Flat Birds (Gaz), as well as several chapbooks. Recent poems can be seen in Brooklyn Rail, Chicago Review, The Delineator, Across the Margin, Open House, Breather, and Jongler (French). She lives in Berkeley, where she works as managing editor of Representations, a scholarly humanities journal, and does advocacy work for members of the University Professional and Technical Employees Union (UPTE). The recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, the George A. and Eliza Howard Gardner Foundation, and the Fund for Poetry, Day has also benefited from the generous support of the Millay Colony, where LATE HUMAN (UDP, 2021) was completed.
Author City: BERKELEY, CA USA