Sleeping It Off in Rapid City: Poems, New and Selected - Hardcover

Kleinzahler, August

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374265836 ISBN 13: 9780374265830

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008

Synopsis

The first broad retrospective of August Kleinzahler’s career, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City gathers poems from his major works along with a rich portion of new poems that visit different voice registers, experiment with form and length, and confirm Kleinzahler as among the most inventive and brilliant poets of our time. Travel—actual and imaginary—remains a passion and inspiration, and in these pages the poet also finds “This sanctified ground / Here, yes, here / The dead solid center of the universe / At the heart of the heart of America.”

About this title

About the Author:

August Kleinzahler was born in Jersey City in 1949. He is the author of ten books of poems and a memoir, Cutty, One Rock. His most recent book of poetry, The Strange Hours Travelers Keep, was awarded the 2004 Griffin Poetry Prize. He won the Lannan Literary Award in 2008.  He lives in San Francisco.

From Publishers Weekly:

Starred Review. The witty, gritty poet and memoirist Kleinzahler (The Strange Hours Travellers Keep) has produced chiseled, sometimes curt and finely observed free verse for decades. Kleinzahler has lived in Montreal, San Francisco, Vancouver, Portugal and Berlin; his sketches of characters and places from at least four continents include affectionately cynical portraits of hoodlums, odes to the autumn failures of baseball teams and swiftly cinematic depictions of Tartar hordes in medieval Europe, ripping the ears off hussars. Hackensack, N.J.; the foggy Bay Area with its foggier ex-hippies; and northern European lakes and mountains all receive their due in a poetry that aspires to the feel of bebop and the delight of travel writing, that never bores and rarely repeats itself. New poems add to, rather than swerve away from, Kleinzahler's strengths in close observation and all-over-the-map diction, from slang to technical terms. Overheard speech in Above Gower Street, a poem about the loneliness of international travel, ranges from an answering machine's anodyne messages to an explicit sexual come-on; in Vancouver, the neon mermaid over the fish place/ looks best that way, in the rain. This ninth book of poems and first trade press new-and-selected should bring this master of free verse lines even more admirers. (Apr.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0374265836
• ISBN 13: 9780374265830
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256