Anthony Caleshu

In his new book of poems, Anthony Caleshu writes after the visual art of Julie Curtiss, Jade Fadojutimi, Shara Hughes, Shio Kusaka, Henry Taylor, Emma Webster, and Jonas Wood (also included, a musical interlude after the music of Pixies). Poems move in and out of interiors, portraits, landscapes, abstractions, and the phenomena of xenia - Greek for 'hospitality', later adopted by the Romans as a category of 'still-life' painting featuring welcoming platters of fruit and the like. If ekphrastic in tradition, the poems privilege lyric and narrative in(ter)vention, springboarding from the visual arts into new spaces of speculation, transformation, and wonder.

"Caleshu's new collection is magnificent. There's something uniquely pleasurable and painful about the blinding insights in every prose poem. It's like someone looking you in the eye and, unusually, feeling compelled to hold their gaze. What really moves me here is the way we hedge our disappointment, play our joy against our self-awareness. So much love and fear and grace and frustration: it's at once uncomfortable and deeply life-affirming. It's maybe a rare quality in contemporary poetry, but what makes this work so authentically alive, so urgent and poignant is that very ambivalence, delivered with a restless intellect and wit and turn of phrase that keeps you coming back." -Luke Kennard

"Anthony Caleshu's Victor is a wild ride, an arctic adventure, a spirited quest narrative, a mad love poem to the imagination in all its unstrung wild joys. The exuberance of address in this poem is contagious, at once zany and intimate, descriptive and lyric, it's pedal to the metal and won't let up. Caleshu is an extremely gifted and accomplished poet and a true romantic to boot." -Peter Gizzi

James Tate is one of America’s most respected and senior poets, whose influence is increasingly widespread. However, his whimsical play has long challenged critics to read him with any depth. After winning the Yale Prize in 1967 for his first book, The Lost Pilot, published when he was just twenty-three, Tate has since gone on to win major literary awards including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Tanning Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Academy of American Poets. This is the first monograph dedicated to Tate’s œuvre. The author provides a practical reading theory for Tate, complete with contextual frameworks. Close readings of Tate’s work are informed by the purposeful purposelessness of Kant, the surrealist debt to Breton, and the problems and pleasures of language as explored by Derrida. Tate’s great achievement is no less than a reconfiguring of the modern American lyric as a poetry of dramatic and dialogic narrative. Composed out of ‘odds and ends ... of no great moment’, as the poet himself writes, Tate’s work extends the varied American traditions of writers such as William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, John Berryman, and John Ashbery.