Böcker av Charles Rafferty

Charles Rafferty¿s latest collection of prose poems turns philosophical. In A Cluster of Noisy Planets, Rafferty captures the rhythms and patterns of life as a lover, father, and poet, distilling each moment to its essence and grounding them collectively in the wider perspective of a changing world, the constant turning of the stars and the changing seasons of the New England countryside. With a knowing nod to the passage of time¿day to day, year to year, epoch to epoch¿these lyrical poems form a record of the profound, ephemeral joys, losses, and echoes of commonplace moments.

Though it might not be yet apparent, what the world hungers for-not just the poetry world but all sentient beings-are the rapturous, precise, lyrical revelations in Charles Rafferty's Appetites, a startling collection full of poems that chart desire through an abandoned couch transformed into redeeming ecstasy, that channel the "popcorned and sawdusty air" of the circus tent where folks gather to turn away from themselves, that show us the subversive art of souvenir-taking in the form of a sliver of Picasso's signature smuggled under a fingernail, and that give us a "Prelude" for our time. In the vein of Stephen Dobyns and Denis Johnson, but ever original and even more expertly-crafted, Rafferty is a major American poet. If you don't know his work yet, you owe yourself this chapbook. -Ravi Shankar

Prose poems that turn conventional thought on its head, allowing magic to spring from mundane details of middle age life.