Description
Poetry. Nightboat Poetry Prize Winner 2010, selected by Franz Wright. Paula Cisewski guides us through a landscape that resonates with the fugitive and far-gone, the ghosts of what Whitman calls our "go-befores." A brother vanishes, and gives rise to a second city of the mind, in which "the dead and the missing" remain citizens, in which Keats's negative capability is the sheriff in town. Cisewski constructs a swaggering, tender, Carneyesque Fargo of the mind ("Do we love Heaven more than God?"), a place that relentlessly arrests and releases our loved ones. This is a book of poems that fares forever forward, quixotic, in the fullest sense of the word: picaresque, curious, errant, and hilarious. In a midwestern odyssey at once metaphysical and emphatically real, Cisewski confronts (as Nancy Cunard once wrote) "every windmill in a landscape of windmills."
Author Bio
Paula Cisewski's fourth poetry collection, Quitter?, co-won Diode Editions' 2016 Book Prize and her third, THE THREATENED EVERYTHING, was the finalist selected for publication in the 2014 Burnside Review Book Contest. Both appeared in early 2017. Cisewski is also the author of GHOST FARGO (Nightboat Books, 2010, selected by Franz Wright for the Nightboat Poetry Prize), UPON ARRIVAL (Black Ocean, 2006), and a chapbook of lyric prose, Misplaced Sinister (Red Bird Chapbooks).
Author City: MINNEAPOLIS, MN USA