The Floating Bridge

by David Shumate

Overview

The Floating Bridge, David Shumate’s second collection of prose poems, transports its readers over the chasm between the mundane and the enchanted. We traverse one bridge and find ourselves eavesdropping on Gertrude Stein and her gardener. We take the night bus to Gomorrah to have a look around. Halfway across, each bridge vanishes beneath our feet. Our world shifts. The commonplace begins to glow. We turn the page. Another bridge awaits.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822990765
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	01/27/2008
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	88
File size:	234 KB

About the Author

David Shumate is the author of High Water Mark, winner of the 2003 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. His work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, Atlanta Review, Mississippi Review, and Mid-American Review, among other publications. Shumate is poet-in-residence at Marian College in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Table of Contents

Contents Far Villages Manniquins Kafka The Next Village Big Brother Loses His Virginity Fresh Fish Pulling a Rabbit Out of a Hat Don Quixote Metaphors Translating a Poem The Overwhelming Sadness of the Earth Plum Wisdom The Orange Flags of Babylon The Orange Flags of Babylon Learning to Eat a Pomegranate The Yellow Bird Picasso The Headless Saints The Amateur Zen Master Trapped Inside of a Haiku Poem The Island of Nirvana Rain The Dreams of Children Trains The Long Road The Bible Belt The Bible Belt The Gods The Ladders of Purgatory Drawing Jesus Jesus's IQ Seduction The Jewish Ghetto Boarding the Bus to Gomorrah Om Zero Halo The House of Death Paris The Bedouins of Paris Spring in Paris Lucifer The Kissing Institute Pornography French Forign Legion Gertrude Stein's Gardener Dying Park The Gates of Paris An American in Paris Paris, USA The Floating Bridge The Floating Bridge Making a Forest A Visit with Dali North Wind Children's Book Illustrations, Circa 1890 Learning Italian Slowly A Poem I Wrote Thirty Years Ago Chinese Restaurant Welcome Home, Children The History of the Umbrella While I Sleep The Fish Acknowledgements

Editorial Reviews

I was deeply taken by David Shumate's The Floating Bridge. There is none better working now at this very difficult genre, the prose poem.

Jim Harrison

Vanquishes once and for all the notion that the prose poem is somehow inherently 'not a real poem.' Exhibits a sustained level of innate lyricism and imagism rarely seen even in conventional lyric free verse. Unfailingly, the little prose jewels in 'The Floating Bridge' exhibit the most fundamental property of fine poems: each whole is many times greater than the sum of its parts.

Cider Press Review

Even the most enthusiastic partisans of the form will tell you that good prose poems are nearly as rare as good sonnets, the manatee, or Republicans with a social conscience, and thus the canny and compelling prose poems of David Shumate's The Floating Bridge are especially welcome. The poems are filled with surprising imaginative reckonings, wit that never devolves into mere whimsy, and an underlying sense of pathos that recalls the work of some of the great European masters of the form-figures like Zbigniew Herbert and Jean Follain. The Floating Bridge is a collection to savor and return to.

David Wojahn

David Shumate's devotion to the prose poem is persuasive evidence of its movement in from the margins (or perhaps of poetry's movement out to the margins). High Water Mark: Prose Poems reads like the work of a conversational free-verse poet who has decided that line breaks are a needless vestigial reflex. His funny, tender little allegories are how Carl Dennis or Billy Collins might write if the Return keys fell off their laptops.

New York Times on High Water Mark

This is the best, most spectacular book of prose poetry to be published in years. The poems are woven from a natural voice that uses daily human knowledge and experience to paint timeless portraits that reverberate with imagination and a trust in simple language. The result is a book that emerges from the growing self-consciousness of the prose poem to show us how a straight-ahead vision carries the most weight.

Bloomsbury Review on High Water Mark

Shumate's collection consists of over 50 gems . . . each one loaded with the living essence that hovers just beyond rationality's gate. [He] is a master of this forthright form. His book is a key to the room where dreams are stored.

Nuvo

“I was deeply taken by David Shumate’s The Floating Bridge.  There is none better working now at this very difficult genre, the prose poem.”
—Jim Harrison

"Shumate's collection consists of over 50 gems . . .  each one loaded with the living essence that hovers just beyond rationality's gate. Shumate is a master of this forthright form [prose poetry]. His book is a key to the room where dreams are stored."
--Nuvo

"David Shumate vanquishes once and for all the notion that the prose poem is somehow inherently 'not a real poem.' This collection exhibits a sustained level of innate lyricism and imaginism rarely seen even in conventional lyric free verse. Unfailingly, the little prose jewels in The Floating Bridge exhibit the most fundamental property of fine poems: each whole is many times greater than the sum of its parts."
--Cider Press Review

From the Publisher