Losers Dream on - Phoenix Poets

4.22 ( 55 Ratings by Goodreads)
Losers Dream on

Losers Dream on - Phoenix Poets

(Author)
4.22 (55 Ratings by Goodreads)
paperback
Published: 8 March, 2018
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Description

We are all losing all the time. Four titanic forces--time, mortality, forgetting, and confusion--win victories over us each day. We all "know" this yet we keep dreaming of beautiful fulfillments, shapely culminations, devotions nobly sustained--in family life, in romance, in work, in citizenship. What obsesses Halliday in Losers Dream On is how to recognize reality without relinquishing the pleasure and creativity and courage of our dreaming. Halliday's poetry exploits the vast array of dictions, idioms, rhetorical maneuvers, and tones available to real-life speakers (including speakers talking to themselves). Often Halliday gives a poem to a speaker who is distressed, angry, confused, defensive, self-excusing, or driven by yearning, so that the poem may dramatize the speaker's state of mind while also implying the poet's ironic perspective on the speaker. Meanwhile, a few other poems (for instance "A Gender Theory" and "Thin White Shirts" and "First Wife" and "You Lament") try to push beyond irony into earnestness and wholehearted declaration. The tension between irony and belief is the engine of Halliday's poetry.
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More Details

Type Book
ISBN13 9780226533599
ISBN10 022653359X
Number Of Pages 80
Item Weight 1000 g
Publisher / Reseller The University of Chicago Press
Format paperback
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Media Reviews

" 'And you try to be awake, ' growls Mark Halliday. These poems are fully awake, practicing vivisection on their own delusions, complacencies, and sublimities, carving into the tissue of language. Song here sounds more like invoice than voice. Yet its wit reveals the timeless: sorrow for a dying father, a lost wife, and the core recognition of our 'dustitude.' A remarkable book."--Rosanna Warren "Mark Halliday is one of our foremost technicians of the American vernacular. In Halliday's poems, James Joyce, Leave It To Beaver, and Sir Walter Raleigh all get their turn at the microphone. I admire Halliday's dedication to coherence, self-interrogation, and endless verbal playfulness. His voice is one of the most reliable, hilarious, effervescent, and moody pleasures in the contemporary canon. His rich new collection, Losers Dream On, holds its own with the high standard of his best work."--Tony Hoagland

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Author's Bio

Mark Halliday has taught in the creative writing program at Ohio University since 1996. His six previous books of poems include Jab and Thresherphobe, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

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