Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Grotesque Tenderness

Grotesque Tenderness

Cowper, Daniel

Paperback

Series: Hugh MacLennan Poetry, Book 48

General Poetry

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0773556273
ISBN13: 9780773556270
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: May 15 2019
Pages: 144
Weight: 0.35
Height: 0.40 Width: 5.00 Depth: 7.30
Language: English

Afraid to be alone / we met by lamplight, trading stories: // Sin of Man was one, // Age of Science, another. More // prayers than answers.

Daniel Cowper's debut poetry collection, Grotesque Tenderness, speaks for an unrooted age, for unrooted people. In these poems, city-dwellers long to ally themselves with some sympathetic culture or the evolutionary logic of nature, but those alliances remain conditional, ambiguous, or dangerous. A tsunami smashes a harbour city into tide-rows of burning debris; children chase snakes in summer meadows. The primordial past spins off rogue by-products and flawed replicas, while lonely office workers get high on back porches and drink themselves to sleep.

The musical and kinetic energy of Grotesque Tenderness is driven by our urge to understand pain and our hunger to reach an imperfect reconciliation with the problems of guilt and suffering. But in the tradition of William Blake, these poems affirm again and again that the lit / world goes on living and life justifies itself through its own workings.

From elegant lyrics of alienation and heartbreak to long-form mythopoeia and lament, these poems approach beauty, ugliness, even criminality in a spirit of wonder and vulnerability.

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