Fear of Description
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
From Midwestern bars to Brooklyn apartments, narrative poems that find millennials adrift--in political upheaval and personal crisis--and trying to find their way back to one another
Winner of the 2018 National Poetry Series competition, selected by Brenda Shaughnessy
These poems tell the story of a generation in crisis: at odds with its own ideals, precariously (or just un-) employed, and absolutely terrified of seeing itself in the planet's future. Is our contemporary moment pure tragedy, or a dark joke? Can it be both? Cutting back and forth in time and ranging between elegiac lyrics and autobiographical accounts of a group of poets moving from Iowa to Brooklyn in the years just before and after the 2016 election, Fear of Description reinvigorates the prose poem, exploring the slippery terrain between grief and friendship, artifice and technology, writing and ritual, hauntings and obsessions--searching for joy in art but instead finding it in pitch darkness.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A winner of the National Poetry Series, the lively second collection from Poppick (The Police) uses randomized lyrics and haibun-inspired prose pieces to tell a coming-of-age story from graduate school in Iowa City, to the poet's 30s in Brooklyn. Poppick's writing is filled to the brim with "the d cor of the actual world, which," the poet emphasizes, "I take great pains not to call the real.'" The book's three haibun-inspired works chart journeys both physical (to a poetry festival, through an eerie, abandoned property) and emotional (navigating the deaths of acquaintances) and, in doing so, ruminate on topics from the semiotics of Lisa Frank imagery to communion with the dead. Poppick's penchant for syntactical disorder and oddity creates a giddy state of confusion as the poet's psycho-emotional state turns and breaks with each line: "The spruce are full of a magnetic, marshal song," he writes. "Rage is in season." Perhaps most memorable are the long, multi-section poem "Aries" and the short title poem, wherein "mute life plays, rising to the skin/ To dream this concrete/ Shape we're in." Poppick's sage, anthemic collection memorably explores the journey of millennials.
