We are thrilled to share with you an excerpt from an amazing review of Kevin Prufer's In a Beautiful Country that was published in FIELD Magazine's most recent issue. Congratulations to you, Kevin!
“From the onset, an uncanny, almost subliminal tension is established between the anodyne references to “beautiful country” and falling in love and the dawning realization that “love” here bears the burden of suicide and war. We may want to interpret the first two images as simply reckless behavior, and indeed the next lines might seem to authorize a more optimistic reading: “The gold-haired girl is singing into your ear / about how we live in a beautiful country. / Snow drifts from the clouds / / into your drink. It doesn’t matter about the war.” But the poem then turns again, this time unmistakably:
A good way to fall in love
is to close up the garage and turn the engine on,
then down you’ll fall through lovely mists
as a body might fall early one morning
from a high window into love…
What makes this poem, like much of Prufer’s extraordinary new collection, so powerful is its command of a multilayered and utterly distinctive tonality; turning repeatedly back on itself, shifting between major and minor keys, it keeps the reader on guard, uncomfortably alert to what will happen next, and in the process implicating us directly in its emotional landscape.”
