The Sleep of Reason

by David Gewanter

Overview

The Sleep of Reason plunges us into a macabre world where good impulses bring on evil consequences—a world not unlike our own. In David Gewanter's alternately delightful and startling poems, allegory comes alive and stalks a bookstore's musty aisles, comedians eviscerate their families for a laugh, lovers love each other for withholding affection, and theaters collapse on audiences hungry for spectacle. Amidst such surreal subjects, Gewanter's delicate musicality and keen sense of humor sparkle; his inquisition regarding a fallen world becomes a dark comedy of errors haunted by the most unexpected characters—from JFK Jr. to Tacitus, Redd Foxx to General Motors, Mariah Carey to 100 rabbits with herpes. An offbeat satire for an off-kilter age, The Sleep of Reason offers an incisive guide to moral behavior in an immoral world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226289731
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	10/18/2003
Series:	Phoenix Poets
Edition description:	1
Pages:	72
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

David Gewanter, an associate professor of English at Georgetown University, is the author of In the Belly, which won the John C. Zacharis First Book award from Ploughshares magazine, and co-editor of The Collected Poems of Robert Lowell. He has received a Witter Bynner Fellowship and a Whiting Writers' Award.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
I
A is for Allegory
See Saw
After the Wall
Gag
Jacopone: The Scissors
II
Cobbler's Children
Xenia: Stanger/Guest
Chai: 1924-2000
Tacitus: City of Unseens
Catullus VIII
One-Page Novel
Divorce and Mr. Circe
Marriage: Six Primers
Or What You Will
Zero-Account
Convolvulus, a Lullaby
Redd-Pound Slamma
A Lie-Awake Dirge
Revenger Sonnet
Jacopone: House
Y
Traffic of CReations
The Loop: JFK Jr
III
Jacopone: On the Cobbles
Hocus Pocus

Notes

Editorial Reviews

"The Sleep of Reason is a strong collection from a writer who seems to possess that most curious and necessary of literary attributes—a moral vision."

New York Times Book Review

"Gewanter's stunned clarity, his sense of poetry's ethical possibilities, goes beyond the fragile comic pleasure of his poems."

Poetry - Brian Phillips

Author honored in Whiting Foundation Writer’s Awards, Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation

Whiting Foundation Writer’s Awards

"The poems . . . are unapologetically eclectic and intellectual, yet never inaccessible. Gewanter tempers his scholarship with humor and irony, a combination which produces some truly beautiful results."

Harvard Review - Kathleen Rooney

Author honored in Whiting Foundation Writer’s Awards, Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation

Whiting Foundation Writer’s Awards

Author honored in Whiting Foundation Writer’s Awards, Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation

Whiting Foundation Writer's Awards

Gewanter's stunned clarity, his sense of poetry's ethical possibilities, goes beyond the fragile comic pleasure of his poems.

— Brian Phillips

Poetry

The poems . . . are unapologetically eclectic and intellectual, yet never inaccessible. Gewanter tempers his scholarship with humor and irony, a combination which produces some truly beautiful results.

— Kathleen Rooney

Harvard Review

Gewanter is at his best as a peripatetic, expository poet...The Sleep of Reason is a strong collection from a writer who seems to possess that most curious and necessary of literary attributes—a moral vision.—David Orr

The New York Times

In a wry, arch, self-consciously Eliotic voice, Gewanter attempts in this second collection to chart a vexed moral universe: "Daily I am told/ to love my neighbor-but huddled/ inside my love is a loathing for his filthy life." Socially conscious lyrics that pick up from Robert Lowell (Gewanter was the co-editor of the recently released Lowell Collected) juxtapose the classical with the contemporary: Bill Clinton comes on as Catullus; a Parkinson's patient is called "Mr. Circe." General Motors, Hitler, Charles Atlas and John F. Kennedy Jr. appear in the book's second half. The harm/help binarism is mined relentlessly: animal rights activists free diseased rabbits; Quakers hunt whales for God. Throughout, a Lowell-like visceral force contends with a tendency toward cleverness ("Is Cassius Clay?"). "Chai 1924-2000,"an elegy for the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, can't quite forgo that archness, ruminating on "Your name, in the macaroni/ of tongues, Ah-me-hide,/ foreign and sentimental// as the pendant Chai-life-/ noosing the ancients of St. Pete/ waiting for the Early Bird Special/ ...Drop the page,/ come out. Come out." Yet the overall impression that the book leaves is of a seriousness and rigor in trying to find a means to moral clarity; even if it sometimes seems "scrawled/ onto Vanna's body," it is, finally, "a love letter/ charge/ of piety." (Nov.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly