Böcker av David Koehn

Poetry that explores wildness and composes a landscape of complex human emotions. Drawing on a range of stylistic influences, the poetry of Sur takes on the essence of connection and the ways in which we continually develop meaning about others and to the natural world. With this collection, David Koehn paints a landscape where wilderness intertwines with human emotions and grows between ill-fitting interpersonal connections. Sur invites readers to step back and look critically at their world while remaining intimately intertwined with it. Throughout, imagery of nature--like a snake drinking from a stream, or a mountain god--blends with the emotional landscape of tumultuous relationships, exploring themes of wildness and an inevitable unraveling of secrets.

"Scatterplot navigates the landscape of imagination through a series of variations on being lost-and found. Koehn's investigations allow the failures of consciousness, the gaps in the knowable, as he grapples with a sensory terrain perceivable in the shadow of natural history and the glow of the family room TV. Here is a father and son walking the sloughs of the California Delta through the mayhem of a world dismissive of, but requiring, love. The work diagrams connections from media, art, film, music, nature, history, and details about members of his family into a web of coordinates forming constellations of beauty and tragedy. From the music of Bad Brains to the life-cycle of the Tongue Eating Louse to the deconstruction of Mutant Mania toys to the talking poems of David Antin to the suicide of Anthony Bourdain - the work details both how this writer embraces the present, and takes responsibility for his insufficiencies and fiascos, in a world so full of imperfection one can't but both laugh and cry. In what amount to a mix of experiments - erasures, surreal narratives, collage, walking/talking poems, and more - the delta between right now and forever seems inextricably present and pleasurably mixed. Wild vulnerability, infinitely odd observation, and uninhibited daring inhabit these poems"--

The 2013 May Sarton New Hampshire Prize Winner for Poetry