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ISBN: 9780977901920
Click here to see the handbound edition Distinct, clear, and free of flourishes, the poems in The Pictures examine war, boredom, death, love, decay, happiness, and worship through a series of moving and still images. In one poem, from a group of “moving” pictures, three soldiers bide their time in a barren landscape, awaiting destruction; in a “still” picture, a group of stones invite us to pay closer attention to them; in another still picture, a woman stands with her mouth open, fists clenched, words unimportant. Sight is unmysterious but wondrous in this book; the poems demonstrate that to look at something or to read it is to experience it, along with its attendant sadness or joy. The "pictures" collected here are communicative and profound, quick to read but long to develop. About the Author Winner of the Fifth Annual Boston Review Poetry Contest, Max Winter has poems appearing recently in Free Verse, New American Writing, Ploughshares, The Paris Review, Colorado Review, Volt, The Yale Review, The Canary, Denver Quarterly, First Intensity, GutCult, TYPO, and New Young American Poets (Southern Illinois, 2000). He has published reviews in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, Newsday, and BOMB, and is a Poetry Editor of Fence. Reviews of The Pictures "A long-awaited debut by a promising younger poet." "The Pictures . . . knows how to please; its breathy moments of profundity are tempered by an evenly handled attention to the landscape of the imagination." "denial is combined with wonder, naïveté with all-knowingness. The seeming limitedness of this speaker, often failing to describe or know with certainty, creates a fascinating kind of realism, neither psychological nor precisely sur-. The Pictures is then both a good experiment and solid evidence that something new can still happen. It’s very much worth reading." Excerpts from The Pictures:
Readings & events October 17, 2009: Kingston, NY September 27, 2008: Brooklyn, NY January 31, 2008: Brooklyn, NY November 8, 2007: Iowa City, IA April 27, 2007: Coral Gables, FL February 21, 2007: New York, NY February 17, 2007: New York, NY |
