My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge
Poems
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
“A Paul Guest poem likes to pull out fast in the first line, then zigzag from one eye-opening image to another: A high-speed, innervating trip all the way.”
—Dallas Morning News
Whiting Award-winning and acclaimed poet Paul Guest’s My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge is an audaciously brilliant collection—a compendium of honesty, strange beauty, and pain—poems Louis Gluck calls, “urgent and moving,” and Robert Haas calls, “vibrant with news of the world seen from an angle of experience not available to most of us.” Mary Karr says, “Guest is a spirit to be reckoned with. Here’s a body of new work to cheer about.” Guest's first book, The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World won the 2002 New Issues Prize in Poetry, and his second book, Notes for My Body Double, won the 2006 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. His memoir, One More Theory About Happiness will be available in May 2010.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Paralyzed in a bicycle accident at age 12, Guest as an adult has turned his serious anger, his irrepressible energies and his sex drive into an instantly recognizable and passionate style. This third collection (his first from a New York trade house) comes with a blog and the promise of a memoir, which should raise the profile of these poems. On the one hand, the zigzag free verse portrays the poet's frustrations, "twenty-one years/ into the telling of a poor joke,/ made of pain, nerves snuffed like wicks": "No music but smashed guitars/ would be enough." On the other, the poems race, churn and tumble over themselves with a welcome, often R-rated, power of invention. Guest (Notes for My Body Double) might be Percy Bysshe Shelley crossed with Nick Flynn, or Neruda fused with Dean Young, at once perpetually dissatisfied and breathless with anticipation. A poem called "Audio Commentary Track 1" brings in "stuporous public sex/ at skating rinks and professional wrestling matches," along with "lethally ascetic Canadian monks," then explains, "To me each convulsive sob sounds like joy." Guest's fast-paced, sometimes even offensive third volume could be a poetry hit.
