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Martin Corless-Smith

Every poem an epitaph, every poem a ticket to ride, from Sappho’s “bittersweet” eroticism to the “wild civility” of Robert Herrick. Martin Corless-Smith is a poet, painter, and translator of canonical poems, and each of these vocations is on view in this memorable defense of poetry as he reads from Virgil to Notley in sight of the impossible blue of Bellini’s Doge Leonardo Loredan and Piranesi’s otherworldly Pyramid of Cestius while contemplating the paradoxes of the finite body of the poet dreaming immortal poetry. —Keith Tuma

Querying the embodiment of poetry, Corless-Smith begins in the body of the poet—living and/or dead—and passes from there through the body of the reader in order to argue the mutual construction of the body of a poem as a shared body and a new commons, which, like all things vital to survival—air, water, hope—must be maintained as open and available to all. These succinct, elegant essays perform this maintenance and, in the process, return us to all poetry charged with the energy and insight necessary to continue that maintenance ourselves. —Cole Swensen

Parlor Press, LLC

Illuminations: A Series on American Poetics

The Poet's Tomb

Donald Revell

The essays in Sudden Eden explore the ways in which the memory of Paradise, or experience of the paradisiacal, has shaped canons of experimental writing from the late Middle Ages through to the present day. Keyed to figures as various as Dante and Beckett, Thomas Traherne and Barbara Guest, Sudden Eden proposes a new constellation of Metaphysical, Symbolist, and Postmodern lights—a single, continuous Heaven.

Sudden Eden: Essays

Eric Pankey

“If only words were salt—soluble, savory, vital, electric, ” Eric Pankey writes in “Variations on Hadrian’s Animula, ” one of many virtuosic works in Vestiges: Notes, Responses, and Essays 1988 – 2018. In this diverse collection of lyrical prose, Pankey assays his personal-poetic history with passion, brilliance, and grace. He considers the works of many great poets—Dickinson, Stevens, Donne, Hopkins, Merwin, Justice, Levis, and Lorca, to name just a few—invoking them as teachers and guides. As much about language as the unutterable, sight as the unseen, Vestiges is a gorgeous, vital collection.
—Danielle Cadena Deulen, author of The Riots

Vestiges: Notes, Responses, and Essays 1988 – 2018 maps the mind of one of our best lyrical poets and thinkers. In these concise and nuanced works of prose, Eric Pankey meditates on such subjects as spiritual faith, the poetic image, memory, language, duende, and silence in poetry. Pankey is a quester, a searcher for truth, so it’s no surprise that in Vestiges he eschews nailed-down arguments and grand arrivals, prioritizing the question and the journey towards “the unsayable, the untouchable … the unknowable. ” He reminds us that mystery and uncertainty are not weaknesses, but essential aspects of a life lived richly in both art and faith. —Brian Barker, author of Vanishing Acts

Eric Pankey muses, “What is the divine? How is it made manifest? Where does it reside?” Revisiting the lyric impulse in a post-religious generation, Vestiges ponders the Romantic lyric subject in light of postmodern skepticism with allusions to Biblical contexts, illuminating the phenomenon of wonder in a material yet epistemologically unstable world: “In the lyric, language is both the ritual and the sacrifice at the moment’s altar. ” Guided by an inner compass of memory and desire, psalms and lamentations, restoration and revival, we unearth in ourselves “not a spark, but a splinter of God in each of us, inflamed, working its way to the surface. ” This book, a revitalizing act of faith and inspiration, is a marvelous gift to us.
—Karen An-hwei Lee, author of Phyla of Joy

Vestiges: Notes, Responses, & Essays 1988–2018

Donna Stonecipher

"In this fascinating book, Donna Stonecipher doubles down on the development of prose poetry and the city. Tactically, her sweeping, complex yet meticulous essay engages Baudelaire's sudden--or is it sudden?--incursion from the constraints of verse into the 'roominess' of prose, 'paragraphs of place, ' while linking 'civic horizontality' and 'corporate verticality.' Tracking possibilities, (m)using everything from architecture to landscape to cookbooks, fl neur-like, her essay exuberantly and expertly gathers together rhizomatic threads of thinkers and poets of the last two centuries. Reads like a song." --Norma Cole

"This fascinating exploration of the prose poem begins with a question that most other studies have overlooked or taken for granted: 'What, if anything, do cities and prose poetry have to do with each other?' Donna Stonecipher's touchstone for this question is Charles Baudelaire's prose poems in Le Spleen de Paris, but her excavation of the relationship between the 'built environment' of prose poem and city moves backwards to ancient Greece and forwards to the new sentence. 

As Stonecipher unpacks the 'dialogic space' of the prose poem, her essay moves vertically and horizontally, providing histories of the skyscraper and the aesthetics and ethics of vertical ascension, and much else. As she moves nimbly through large swaths of intellectual, architectural, urban, and aesthetic history, Stonecipher engages debates central to poetics and to modernity itself, taking seriously the challenge of considering how aesthetic forms register, respond to, and transform their built, social, and historical environments. An indispensable and enlightening guide that is also a pleasure to read." --Susan Rosenbaum