Saturday, February 28, 2009

What is Michelle Boisseau reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Michelle Boisseau, a professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City whose books of poetry include No Private Life (Vanderbilt 1990); Understory, winner of the Morse Prize (Northeastern University Press 1996); Trembling Air (University of Arkansas Press 2003), a PEN USA finalist; and A Sunday in God-Years (University of Arkansas Press 2009).

Two books mentioned in her entry:
David Schloss's new book of poems, Group Portrait from Hell; for people who love poems, it's a book that comes from paradise. Schloss is a skilled poet of formal meters, and he uses them with the wit and aplomb of the great Latin poets: to call attention to the foibles, ghastliness, and hilarity of their age, and to do it bravely, for it meant life or death or exile. Schloss speaks as an exile in the strange land where we find ourselves: our times. I also just finished the brand new book by the young poet Randall Mann, Breakfast with Tom Gunn, an outrageous and gorgeous and side-splitting collection of poems. Mann writes exquisite formal poems, and they crackle on the page. If Mann were writing these in prose the authors of Prop 8 in California would figure out a new proposition to hush him up. As is, he flies under the radar, writing poetry that is harrowing, sharp, and for adults.[read on]
Read more about A Sunday in God-Years, including a sample poem from the collection, "Sandcastle Guarded by a Cicada Shell."

Writers Read: Michelle Boisseau.

--Marshal Zeringue