Description
Book SynopsisWinnowed from a distinguished career, then distilled, then polished and winnowed again, the poems in You Are Here are Leon Stokesbury’s most successful and finished from fifty year’s of published work.
The selections from his earlier volumes are as fully realized as one would expect from the winner of the AWP Poetry Competition and the Poets’ Prize. But it is in Stokesbury’s new work, collected under the heading “These Days,” that he shows us something completely different. From a county carnival sideshow to Hitchcock’s Mount Rushmore, from John Keats’s backyard to the miseries of a failed crematorium operator, every turning of a page reveals a particular we didn’t see coming. You Are Here truly seems like a sideshow of this modern world, even when we read and find, amazed, our own selves looking back at us.
“Why do we still only stand here?” Stokesbury asks in one of his earliest efforts. And all the other poems in this collection give him such varied answers that readers will have no idea what the next page holds, only that they will find themselves somewhere new.
Trade Review“[Stokesbury] is one of the funniest poets I know. He has a way of making opposed tones of voice collide that is uniquely his own. He has a genuine grasp of the loneliness and horror of this world, but he is never so tragic as when he is hilariously clowning. These opposed qualities, like the opposed tones of voice, give his work an astonishing tension and breadth.”
—W. D. Snodgrass
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“Leon Stokesbury is a poet of subtle but often startling insight, a voice speaking in familiar, conversational tones, friend to friend, then a perception as arresting as a shift of light in a forest wind. We are fortunate to have this selection of Stokesbury’s work written over decades and to enjoy his versatile style, humorous, satirical, and his piercing observations. You Are Here presents a perspective on where we have been and where we might be going.”
—Pattiann Rogers, author of Holy Heathen Rhapsody|
“Leon Stokesbury writes with a pure and beautiful clarity, and that clarity is exacting. Whether he is elegiac or irate, magnanimous or biting, amused or exasperated, Stokesbury is always clear about what he thinks and what he feels. With his poems, you always know where he stands and where you stand. When he says You Are Here, as he does in the title of his new book, you truly are, and in his poetry’s good company, it’s a wonderful place to be.”
—Andrew Hudgins, author of After the Lost War and American Rendering: New and Selected Poems
