Horror Vacui: Poems - Hardcover

Heise, Thomas

3.97

37 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1932511318 ISBN 13: 9781932511314

Publisher: Sarabande Books, 2006

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“These are ambitious, moving poems, deft, panged, and stunning.”—Dean Young

“Existential chilliness, mourning, and dread find a uniquely compelling voice in Thomas Heise's poetry. . . .”—Alan Williamson

"Horror Vacui offers an often vertiginous account of how death imposes [an] irresistible fact on minds bent on both accommodating and resisting this one inevitable yet impossible truth. . . . And it's this property of being barely held together that makes Horror Vacui so striking. . . . an extraordinary mood piece."—Ray McDaniel

In his haunting debut collection Horror Vacui, Thomas Heise explores the fear of empty space, a mysterious and abiding absence that is a pronounced presence in this poet's lyrical voice.

Thomas Heise holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of California at Davis and a PhD from New York University. Currently he teaches at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec.

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About the Author:

Thomas Heise was born in northern Michigan, raised in southern Florida, education in California and New York, and now lives in Montreal. He won the 2004 Gulf Coast Prize in Poetry. His essays on American literature have appeared in Modern Fiction Studies and in BioCritiques. Currently, he teaches at McGill University in Canada.

From Publishers Weekly:

Haunted by the death of a father, a quietly panicked speaker stages a wily battle against silence in the 26 poems of Heise's debut. The title poem imagines a family spinning out of control in the absence of paternal rule: "You see, over there,/ your children have taken the house/ apart plank by plank and have/ thrown it in the water." A harrowing series of poems called "These New Days" describe a world forever changed and unfamiliar: "...if returned// would you discover someone else, strange in my tattered suit?" And several revisions of the poet's own obituary attempt to accept and take control of death: "Mr. William Thomas Heise, 29,/ entered into rest from massive heart/ failure on Friday, September 22nd,/ 2000. He was scuba diving alone/ at the moment of his death." Many of the poems are cast in narrow, justified columns, as if to head off even the minor chaos of jagged lines. (Apr.)
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