About the Dead |
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Author:
| Mossotti, Travis Keillor, Garrison |
Series title: | May Swenson Poetry Award Ser. |
ISBN: | 978-1-283-25020-7 |
Publication Date: | Jan 2011 |
Publisher: | University Press of Colorado
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Imprint: | Utah State University Press |
Book Format: | Ebook |
List Price: | USD $16.00 |
Book Description:
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Travis Mossotti writes with humor, gravity, and humility about subjects grounded in a world of grit, where the quiet mortality of working folk is weighed. To Mossotti, the love of a bricklayer for his wife is as complex and simple as life itself: ask him to put into words what that sinking is, / that shudder in his chest, as he notices / the wrinkles gathering at the corners of her mouth. But not a whiff of sentiment enters these poems, for Mossotti has little patience for ideas of...
More Description
Travis Mossotti writes with humor, gravity, and humility about subjects grounded in a world of grit, where the quiet mortality of working folk is weighed. To Mossotti, the love of a bricklayer for his wife is as complex and simple as life itself: ask him to put into words what that sinking is, / that shudder in his chest, as he notices / the wrinkles gathering at the corners of her mouth. But not a whiff of sentiment enters these poems, for Mossotti has little patience for ideas of the noble or for sympathetic portraits of hard-used saints. His vision is clear, as clear as the memory of how scarecrows in the rearview, each of them, stuffed / into a body they didn t choose, resembled / your own plight. His poetry embraces unsanctimonious life with all its wonder, its levity, and clumsiness. "About the Dead" is an accomplished collection by a writer in control of a wide range of experience, and it speaks to the heart of any reader willing to catch his drift, and ride it like the billowed / end of some cockamamie parachute all the way / back to the soft, dysfunctional, waiting earth. "