Bad Summon

by Philip Schaefer

Overview

Winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize

Bad Summon explores the relationship between the majesty of nature and the quiet violence humans inflict upon themselves and others. The poems are dipped in loss, traveling between death and mountains, romance and rivers. They are addicted to the truth of experience and the energy behind regret. Bad Summon conjures its own ghost. According to David Baker, the judge who selected the winning manuscript, this is a “surprising, coherent, original collection of lyric poems. I felt peril, heartbreak, catastrophe, sorrow, genuine soulfulness. It’s also funny, yet its humor is not comic but possesses a terrible gravity.” This is a volume every poetry lover will want to explore.

[In this one we aren’t exactly drowning]
but we are falling through water.
Quieter than we expect. Churning
is how we’ll later describe it.
Our arms dig out two wet Cs,
a heart if you want to look at it
that way. Though the body is always
in between—that unoriginal arrow. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781607815532
Publisher:	University of Utah Press
Publication date:	06/30/2017
Series:	Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	72
File size:	272 KB

About the Author

Philip Schaefer is the author of three chapbooks, two cowritten with friend and poet Jeff Whitney. He won the Meridian Editor’s Prize in poetry in 2016. He received his MFA from the University of Montana in Missoula. 

Table of Contents

Contents Foreword by David Baker Suture I. Luminal Static The New World The Unaccounted Evening News Walk Slowly, Don't Stare Earthenware Sisyphus Self Discipline Summer Blackout Once Smoke Screen Overdose Barbiturate Talismania I'm Keeping the Wooden Horse Practicing Invisible Minor Dogma II. [Hideous] Miraculous [Yesterday I found myself awake] Translating Poorly [In this one we aren't exactly drowning] [In this one I'm wearing a paper bag] [In this one you haven't left] [A swarm of neighborhood dogs] After You Left [In this one the car still runs] [In this one you are taking the creek] [It must have been a Saturday] Human Aviary [I am dreaming in this one. You wax] [Two men are playing chess in a park] Autobiographies X [I've been carving my mug shot] Backyard Mirage Therapy [That last month when we broke out] [I went on a date with a man] Elegiac River Rat [I've stopped believing in death] [This the one holding a mug over] Longest Division III. Hell Feelings Hypnosis Buffalo Jump Whale Song Bad Summon The Smoke Detector Where Your Heart Should Be Temp/oral Axis My Friends Eventualities What Dying Was Like Growing Down Smoke Tones Another Language My America Touching Down Notes and Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

​“Philip Schaefer is not the type of poet who always crafts poems with meanings immediately apparent to the reader. In many cases, the poems must simply be absorbed, line by line, as much as they are read. The extra effort is worth it, particularly because Schaefer delivers so many beautiful sentences, one after the other.”—The Missoulian

“Like a séance, Schaefer’s debut is unpredictable. What is summoned is sometimes filthy, sometimes electric, and—more often than not—foaming at the mouth. . . Well, reader, welcome to the new galaxy of hurt, where we sic and summon, where we poke ourselves with needles and cause each other pain, where Schaefer exposes us for the voodoo dolls that we are.”—Kenyon Review

“Philip Schaefer’s debut collection is a workhorse of a book turned unbridled wild-eyed mustang. The scope and shape of these poems are so vast and specific and heart-filled the page seems to bleed. I’m consistently surprised by the amount of leverage this poet is able to pull from the simplest phrase, the lyric made urgent and ravaged and strange. This book is both unlocatable and immediately recognizable. When he writes 'I want to tattoo your imagination onto my lungs' my footing was stable, it was just my breath that was taken away. Read this book.”—Sam Sax, author of Madness 

“What ultimately settled this for me was the constant surprise these poems offered, the degree of invention, and the quality of a new voice and original music. Bad Summon is relatively more interior, more intimate and isolate, and yet it is also fully connective. This is sheer poetry.”—David Baker, author of Never-Ending Birds 

From the Publisher