Celestial Joyride

by Michael Waters

Overview

In these poems of taut clarity, craft, and texture, Michael Waters continues his bold exploration of sensual pleasure and moral transgression as means of affirming spiritual faith. Just as a joyride suggests recklessness and exhilaration, so Celestial Joyride is an energized journey marked by spiritual recklessness in the face of perpetual mortality. Compelling, musical narratives offer rich meaning and vivid consequence.

Michael Waters's poetry books include BOA Editions titles Gospel Night, Darling Vulgarity, finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Parthenopi, finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize. He teaches at Monmouth Universityand in the Drew UniversityMFA Program.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781942683063
Publisher:	BOA Editions, Ltd.
Publication date:	05/10/2016
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Michael Waters’ books of poetry include BOA Editions titles Gospel Night (2011), Darling Vulgarity (2006—finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize), and Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems (2001—finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize), as well as Bountiful (1992), The Burden Lifters (1989), and Anniversary of the Air (1985) from Carnegie Mellon UniversityPress. He has co-edited several anthologies, including Contemporary American Poetry (Houghton Mifflin, 2006) and Perfect in Their Art: Poems on Boxing from Homer to Ali (Southern Illinois UniversityPress, 2003). Shoestring Press in the UK published Selected Poems in 2011. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Poetry, American Poetry Review, Paris Review, Yale Review, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, and Rolling Stone. In 2004, he chaired the Poetry panel for the National Book Award. The recipient of five Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Foundation, the Ledig-Rowohlt Foundation, and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Waters teaches at Monmouth Universityand in the Drew UniversityMFA Program in Poetry and Poetry in Translation.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

Madrigal
*
Effata
Beauty in the World
Punk Prayer
American Songbook
*
Dominoes
Poem, Slow to Come, on the Death of Logan
Marvel
Old School
Old Country Recipes
Pottery Sale
Blackbirds
Tic Tac Toe
*
Sixties Sonnet
Old Records
The Captain’s Tower
The Beatles
The Book of Names
Eve’s Daughter
Mihaela Barefoot
Radu Lupu
*
The Scavengers
The Littoral
Horse (Ars Poetica)
Dog Ears
Quoting Rumi
Jade Garden
*
Morning Run
Erotic Amphora
The New Gods
Last Day on Ios
Sick Student
*
Chernobyl Necklace
Tiganca
Letter to Stern from Suceava
Sucevița Monastery
Voroneț Blue
*
Lord Cockroach
Wooden Boat
*
Notes
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Colophon

Editorial Reviews

PRAISE FOR MICHAEL WATERS

"It is difficult to imagine poetry could be more finely crafted and compelling than the work of Michael Waters, who has been quietly writing some of the best poetry in the United States for the past three decades." —Stephan Delbos, Prague Post

"In lines that are often metrically formal—the decasyllabic line appears in many of [his poems]—there is often a quite wild range of emotion, from the overtly sexual to the politically conscious, the plaintively domestic to the brashly cosmopolitan. This is highly energized verse." —Michael Broek, Poetry International

"Waters seeks to capture the different kinds of negative space which interpenetrate American public life, history, and even the most intimate of moments ‘between two bodies’—what he calls 'the loneliness of two people / together.'" —Jonathan Taylor, Times Literary Supplement

"A significant American voice… testifies eloquently to the persistence of the lyric in a time and history that would seek to obliterate it." —John Mann, World Literature Today

"Waters excels at stark-eyed, honest elegies… all rendered in the strong free verse that is [his] signature. He is a poet of detail, but also one of directness, pursuing strong feeling wherever it dives or climbs." —Publishers Weekly

"Waters seeks and appropriates a rich, malleable language that allows him to express the subtleties of human emotion and the realities of the human condition… Michael Waters is perhaps the best poet of his generation." —Floyd Collins, Gettysburg Review

"Michael Waters’ autobiographical poetry looks back to memorable moments, which include his 6-year-old son: “Is that a log or a dog? he worries.//The poem doesn’t know yet. Guess, it insists./ Meaning to animate the universe,/Dog, I wager (I always wager dog)/And on three wobbly legs the wet log lifts.” He also writes luminously, as in “Eve’s Daughter,” cleaning windows: “Each chamois gesture returning to glass/A certain beauty always there, but less/Obvious before this moment, the light//After seven days’ rain casting judgment//Upon all things with odd clarity: dust/Flared to meaning, your body enraptured/By the hour’s whispered solicitations./Your flown soul unveiled will never be missed://The glass so clean it no longer exists.” Waters stands among the best American poets writing today."— My San Antonio

From the Publisher