Description
Book SynopsisThe Body Distances is filled with long, limber, nimble poems at once ecstatic and elegiac. These poems are odes to the miraculous embedded in the everyday, in which “the unlikely continues / to dovetail with the present.”
Trade ReviewMark Wagenaar’s poems are brimful of the world—generous, fluid, packed with an avid music, with praise and astonishment. In poem after poem, Wagenaar renders a sense of 'a still life with everything in the world,' not in an attempt to freeze-frame the moment but in order to register everything in the moment, in all its registers, as the moment passes. Therefore,
The Body Distances is both ecstatic and elegiac. These are odes to the miraculous embedded in the everyday, in which 'the unlikely continues/ to dovetail with the present.'""—James Haug, Juniper Prize for Poetry co-judge and author of
The Stolen Car""As with those poets who seem to be his touchstones—Larry Levis, Charles Wright, and Albert Goldbarth come to mind—Mark Wagenaar’s poems are capacious, restless narratives and lyrics that are both emotionally nuanced and remarkably fluent in their ability to juggle allusions that range from Dante to Donald Trump, from Madame Curie to Lex Luthor. Yet the erudition of his poems always arises from urgency rather than from the desire for an easy tour de force. As the title of his collection suggests, Wagenaar’s poems are suffused with an acute sense of our mortality, but they are also, in their ambition and relentlessness, oddly celebratory. The Body Distances is a book to savor and return to.""—David Wojahn, author of
World Tree""Charting how our bodies break and bridge toward spirit, Mark Wagenaar’s
The Body Distances traces what our flesh endures from sleeping pills, garbage dumps, coal dust, whiskey, and muons, yet manages to find mercy in a Whitmanesque power to marvel at a mutilated world. This is an ‘all too human’ book by a marvelous poet right when we need it the most.""—Mark Irwin, author of
American Urn: Selected Poems
