ARTIFICIAL LIFE by Michael Gessner

“This collection, Artificial Life, includes several night scenes, lit as if by an expanding network of fireflies.  From a lofty but wordless height, the poet suddenly swoops towards some arresting detail – a party spilling onto a street, a compromised accountant, a wedding photograph, an urban development site, a picnic by a lake, wrinkles on a dog’s face, an old lady in the mountains.  Even a casual relationship is approached by means of a kind of fidelity, its incompleteness illuminated by a valid unsentimentality.  And before he departs again, the poet leaves behind, in his words, an indelible quality, rather as the music of Apollo’s lyre is said, by Ovid, to have lingered in the masonry of the walls at Alcáthoë.”

—Martin Turner

“Artificial Life is brilliantly wrought and blindingly brilliant.  Gessner is second to none. Count him, along with Ashbery and Ammons, among the most stunning intellectual poets of the twentieth century—and into the twenty-first.”

—John Dolis

“When we see ourselves in nature, as in the image of the mammatus clouds that cover this collection, we exist between the perceptions of the natural world and the world itself, in a region guided by echolocation, near the source of the creative act, liminal and durable, that is Artificial Life.  As poetic cosmography, it stands alone, detailed by new forms.”

—Chris Wieland

“Truly original poems that read like the body thinking, the mind feeling.”

—Jefferson Carter

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Michael Gessner lives in Tucson with his wife, a watercolorist, and their son, Chris.  His work has been featured in American Letters & Commentary, American Literary Review, The Journal of The American Medical Association, Oxford Magazine, and others. He has read at University College Dublin, and the American-Irish Historical Society (NYC).  His work has been called “Striking,” David Barber, The Atlantic, and “Structurally ingenious,” Jonathan Galassi, Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 98 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 9781935402299

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