In his first book as the poet laureate of Illinois, Kevin Stein shoulders an array of poetic forms, blending pathos, humor, and social commentary. These poems—ranging from meditative narratives to improvisational lyrics—explore art's capacity to embody as well as express contemporary culture. Stein embraces subjects as various as his father's death, magazine sex surveys, Kandinsky's theory of art, the dangling modifier, Jimi Hendrix's flaming guitar, racial bigotry, and a teacher's comments on a botched poem. Presiding over this miscellany are ghosts of a peculiarly American garden of dreamers and beloved misfits, those redeemed and those left fingering the locked gate.
| Contents ONE Wishful Rhetoric TWO To the Reader Awakened by a Noisy Furnace An American Tale of Sex and Death Reintroductions Adolescent Hemlock In the House of Being The Cost Revelation in Pinks and Red Superstitious Manna Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art Windfall Upon Witnessing My Mother Impossibly Blossom above My Father's Death Bed THREE Love Poem with Knife and Last Cut Zinnia Sappho's Fragment 63 Instructor's Comments on the Poem "Eden Sleeping," Circa 1975 How He Answered the Glossy Magazine's Mate-Poaching Survey Upon Blowing Our Chance to Meet the Poet Laureate, Who's Probably a Nice Guy Etiquette and Epiphany in the Post-Workshop Men's Room The Other One To Bob Marley's Toe 7 Ghosts To Bananas Reliquary FOUR Thinking of Kandinsky while Shaving My Father Theory & Practice Valentine's Day Boxing at the Madison County Jail Found in a Shoe Box Labeled "Keep" In the Nuclear Age Upon Freeing the Ruby-Throated Hummingbird Beak-Stuck in a Screen Door To Wheelbarrows While Writing This Poem, My Horse Jumped the Pasture Fence These Gifts Won't You Stand Next to My Fire Tract | Recipient of a Society of Midland Authors award for poetry published in 2005 (2006). — Society of Midland Authors award for poetry
|Kevein Stein is Illinois Poet Laureate and the Caterpillar Professor of English at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. He is the author of the poetry collections A Circus of Want, Bruised Paradise, and Chance Ransom, as well as the critical studies James Wright: The Poetry of a Grown Man, and Poets, Worldly Acts: Public and Private History in Contemporary American Poetry.