Description
Poetry. A PRAYER FOR THE LESS VIOLENT OFFENDERS showcases New York-based poet Mike Graves' best short poems. Known in New York circles for hosting Phoenix Reading Series in West Village, Graves' is a significant voice celebrating a dark Self coming to grips with a traumatised, wounded and drunken past. The book is a concise but wide-ranging treasure offering the pleasures of formalist, confessional and metaphysical poetry along with the plain-spoken directness of the Beats laced with echoes of the New and Old Testament.
"Written over a quarter of a century, these poems reflect a consistent poetic voice and the best of Michael Graves. He balances metaphor and theme to provide a powerful and convincing perspective on the perduring psychological struggles of being."—A. Nicholas Fargnoli, President of The James Joyce Society
"Michael Graves is a poet old and young, old and new. He has a past, a memory, a sharp eye and a good ear, a thing about snakes and a foxy way with rhyme, an American's voice, an Irish-American's family issues, and an Irish-American's lapsed Catholic's history of uneasy commerce with guilt and the Four Last Things."—John Gordon
Author Bio
Michael Graves is the author of two full-length collections of poems, Adam and Cain (Black Buzzard, 2006) and In Fragility (Black Buzzard, 2011), as well as and two chapbooks, Illegal Border Crosser (Cervana Barva, 2008) and Outside St. Jude's (R. E. M. Press, 1990). In 2004 he was the recipient of a substantial grant of from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation. Thirteen of his poems appear in the James Joyce Quarterly.
Author City: NEW YORK, NY USA