The Winter Dance Party: Poems, 1983-2023

by David Kirby

Overview

The Winter Dance Party lays out, not someone’s entire life, but that person’s life as a poet. This enthralling, career-spanning book by the National Book Award finalist David Kirby is made up mainly of new poems along with a generous number of older ones alternating with one another in nine sections that proceed, not chronologically, but more like chapters in a surreal memoir, with long poems followed by short poems, exploratory formats next to more traditional ones, straightforward poems cheek by jowl with ones that are more allusive.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807182932
Publisher:	Louisiana State University Press
Publication date:	07/01/2024
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

David Kirby teaches at Florida State University, where he is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English. His many books include Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ’n’ Roll, described by the Times Literary Supplement as “a hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense.” In 2016, Kirby received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Florida Humanities, which called him “a literary treasure of our state.”

Editorial Reviews

He is a spieling genius of the compound sentence and laugh-aloud funny.

Booklist

"I've spent a few days carrying Winter Dance Party with me and man, it is a gorgeous cathedral of a book, but instead of rosaries and reliquaries and mummified saints, there is a great gathering of the unwashed, with the perfectly coiffed and perfumed worshippers among them, with catfish sizzling in an iron skillet over an open fire and a band playing soul and blues and rock and roll on instruments that change shape as they are licked and fingered. Hail Marys are last chances here, with dice made of bones skittering against a brick wall in the alley and a wide, lonesome brown river crawling south, filled with the detritus of broken hopes. On the shore, this book takes off its shirt and lands belly first in the mud, padding slowly toward the holy water, singing itself clean."

Keith Flynn

The loquacious style of David Kirby’s poetry can sometimes resemble the riffs of a brainy stand-up comedian.

New York Times Book Review