Dear Friends,
I am excited to announce that my new poetry collection, Death at the Mall, has just been published by Kelsay Books. For me, it represents a milestone in my poetic journey. It features 54 all new poems as well as 16 poems selected from my four previous books. Not only is this my fifth published collection, but it marks over 200 poems published since that day, thirty years ago, when I first began writing poetry. Read what one advance reviewer has to say:
“In Gene Twaronite’s Death at the Mall, a wry and earnest take on the human predicament is everywhere apparent —our desires and follies, our great possibilities and perpetual undoing are all on display. But here too is an underlying sweetness in the poems that perseveres: an orientation of wonder and astonishment, often brought on by the world itself, in all its unknowable splendor, or brought on by the fecklessness of our actions in the face of the grander forces that shape our days. Twaronite’s formal interest and dexterity are on full display in these selected works—whether sestinas spooling out, or the sonic energy of an interior rhyme, or riffs on Marianne Moore or Gertrude Stein. In his poem “Distress,” Twaronite recounts the occasion of coming upon a beached sea lion in distress, “an inscrutable moment / between me and one sea lion / sharing the common anxiety / of where the next blow will fall, / trying to make sense of it all.” In the crucible of Twaronite’s poems, we see the things we are made of with rigorous attention, made new by a capacious imagination.”
— Tyler Meier, Executive Director, University of Arizona Poetry Center
Available here:
https://kelsaybooks.com/products/death-at-the-mall