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About Me
- Paul
- Paul Guest is the author of four volumes of poetry and a memoir. His debut, The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World, was awarded the 2002 New Issues Poetry Prize. His second collection, Notes for My Body Double, was awarded the 2006 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. His third collection, My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge, was published by Ecco Press/HarperCollins in 2008. His fourth collection, Because Everything Is Terrible, was published by Diode Editions. His poems have appeared in Harper's, The Paris Review, Poetry, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. His memoir, One More Theory About Happiness, was published by Ecco in May 2010 and selected for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program. The recipient of a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2007 Whiting Writers' Award, Guest lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.
6 comments:
The last line is an especially major hammer at the end. Reminds me of a favorite of mine, Thomas Lux's "Refrigerator, 1957," in which such a change of tone also gives the poem several extra turns of the screw in the final line!
Great poem. Congrats!
Very nice! I was in a little bookshop on the Upper East Side on Saturday and they had your book on display right up front.
Just saw your book in the ridiculously tiny poetry section of the local bookshop in Sheridan, Wyoming. Just you, Kenneth Koch, and like Longfellow or somebody. Those are some circles you move in, my friend.
I have just read Users Guide to Physical Debilitation on the Paris Review website. It is one on the most powerfully engaging and moving poems that I have read for some time. The voice of practicality linked into the emotional self ends with explicit detail and finality in the lines "It is our hope...thing you ever loved." Thank you so much for sharing this everlasting insight into what life is like for you.
I bought this book after reading on Poetry Daily. Loved the poetry--the humor reminds me of Callahan's art; the grasp of the line and the movement of the poem of Robert Jackson. Impressive work. Thank you for your honesty and absence of bullshit and your wonderful use of the language.
Maybe someday the reviewer's blurbs might have fewer "disabled poet" tags and just "poet," which will probably happen about the same time people refer to Obama as just "the" president!
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