D. A. Powell

*Winner of the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry* I have this rearrangement to make: symbolic death, my backward glance. The way the past is a kind of future leaning against the sporty hood. --from "Bugcatching at Twilight" In Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys - D. A. Powell's fifth book of poetry - the rollicking line he has made his signature becomes the taut, more discursive means to describing beauty, singing a dirge, directing an ironic smile, or questioning who in any given setting is the instructor and who is the pupil. This is a book that explores the darker side of divisions and developments, which shows how the interstitial spaces of boonies, backstage, bathhouse, or bar are locations of desire. With Powell's witty banter, emotional resolve, and powerful lyricism, this collection demonstrates his exhilarating range.

Poems

Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys

D. A. Powell’s first three groundbreaking books Published together for the first time, D. A. Powell’s landmark trilogy of Tea, Lunch, and Cocktails make up a three-course Divine Comedy for our day. With a new introduction by novelist David Leavitt, Repast presents a major achievement in contemporary poetry.

Tea, Lunch, and Cocktails

Repast

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, now in paperback D. A. Powell’s fifth book of poetry, Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys, explores the darker side of divisions and developments, the interstitial spaces of boonies, backstage, bathhouse, and bar. With witty banter, emotional resolve, and powerful lyricism, this collection demonstrates Powell’s exhilarating range.

The first poetry collection by D. A. Powell since his remarkable trilogy of Tea, Lunch, and Cocktails, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award so many of the best days seem minor forms of nearness that easily falls among the dropseed: a rind, a left-behind —from "no picnic" In these brilliant new poems from one of contemporary poetry's most intriguing, singular voices, D. A. Powell strikes out for the farther territories of love and comes back from those fields with loss, with flowers faded, "blossom blast and dieback." Chronic describes the flutter and cruelty of erotic encounter, temptation, and bitter heartsickness, but with Powell's deep lyric beauty and his own brand of dark wit.

Chronic

D. A. Powell's first three groundbreaking books Published together for the first time, D. A. Powell's landmark trilogy of Tea, Lunch, and Cocktails make up a three-course Divine Comedy for our day. With a new introduction by novelist David Leavitt, Repast presents a major achievement in contemporary poetry.

Douglas A. Powell

A contemporary Divine Comedy combines elements of the cocktail lounge, the cinema, and the Gospels, mixed with an eloquence to capture the modern pathos of a poet writing in the aftermath of the AIDS pandemic. Original.

D. A. Powell

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