This week's New Yorker includes Kevin Prufer's latest book in its Briefly Noted section, 4/28/08:
"The America of Prufer’s fourth collection is an empire in decline, a medicated landscape (“snow / like little tranquilizers all over the yard”) peopled by pilgrims to shopping malls. The book opens with a panoramic vision of the aftermath of apocalypse—“expired” cars, silenced TVs, coffins “unmoored and happy with the storm”—but ends intimately, with a child’s memory of his first encounter with death; the thin wire between political failure and personal grief runs taut throughout. In the eerie centerpiece poem, the suburbs are sealed under an enormous parachute, its nylon shimmering; icicles line the seams and crash into the streets, and the narrator walks for days, never finding the edge."
Congratulations, Kevin!
Kevin also received a wonderful review from Robert C. Jones in the Kansas City Star which syndicated to a dozen other papers across the United States, including the Miami Herald .
Of National Anthem , Marie Howe has written “From within the American Empire, [Prufer] is listening to the memory of the future. . . Can this be a poet who can writes the sentence we are, as a people, on the verge of saying?”
National Anthem is available directly from Four Way Books at a 32% discount. Order it, and all our other titles, here
