Description
“Every poem in APRIL AT THE RUINS is a powerhouse: rich, quietly essential, profoundly lucid. Many have flavors of the best parables or folk tales, bringing us into intimate relation with mysteries and transformations abounding around and inside us. The book’s title accurately encapsulates Raab’s role as negative capability ninja, evoking both spring’s beginnings and the flotsam and jetsam of endings. Opposite possibilities and alternative scenarios thrive side by side within the marvelous, snow-globe-like worlds of his poems: what did happen or what might have, the questionable nature of revelation, the slipperiness of the stories we tell ourselves, how we live suspended between death and utter loveliness. Raab’s sense of irony is unerring. These poems prove that one of the only true forms of consolation is giving darkness its due.”
— Amy Gerstler
Poetry.
Author Bio
Lawrence Raab is the author of nine books of poems, including Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts (Tupelo, 2015), which was longlisted for the National Book Award, and named one of the Ten Best Poetry Books of 2015 by The New York Times. An earlier collection, What We Don't Know About Each Other (Penguin, 1993) was a winner of the National Poetry Series and a finalist for the National Book Award. His most recent book of poems is THE LIFE BESIDE THIS ONE (Tupelo 2017). He is also the co-author (with Stephen Dunn) of a chapbook of collaborative poems, Winter at the Caspian Sea. In 2016 Tupelo published his collected essays, WHY DON'T WE SAY WHAT WE MEAN? He is the Harry C. Payne Professor of Poetry Emeritus at Williams College, where he taught for forty-two years.
Author City: WILLIAMSTOWN, MA USA