Editor, publisher, and poet Kevin Prufer presents his ninth poetry collection, The Fears, an intimate meditation on storytelling and mortality. "Ghostlit by streetlights" and filtered through tale and recollection, Prufer examines our fears of loss, death, and obscurity. Narratives are braided together as Prufer manipulates white space to mimic the silence of minds at work on unsolvable problems, how time "unravels / endlessly." Here, visions of classical Greece and the trials of ancient Romans coexist with the everyday—memories of a parent's death or the loss of a pet. We bear witness as the poet writes to preserve the intricacy of his own mind against the "certainty of absence." Exploring what it means to be forgotten and how legacy is preserved through poetry, history books, a mummy's index finger, and love letters from the grave, The Fears invites us to consider what it means to matter.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
October 18, 2023 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781619322813
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781619322813
- File size: 1521 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Starred review from December 22, 2023
Prufer (The Art of Fiction) writes free-verse poems about the fear of death--his own and that seen in the dying of friends and family members as well as historical figures. Some, like "A Dog Barking into the Night," fuse the personal and the historical while holding both together by the stark image of the title. As Prufer muses on the death of his father and the death of the Greek heroine Antigone, his thoughts reflect on each other. These poems are infused with irony as they embrace simple words, parallelism, and engaging line breaks. Each achieves its effect with one striking image that seems to hold the poem together while letting it open out and gather meaning. Take "Ars Poetica," in which Prufer writes about what happens to the brain as the poet composes his work while hearing the silence of, say, the window that glows "beyond that line of trees." The title poem, "The Fears," is one of the best here; it describes the process of writing a poem, noting the places where "the poems sometimes failed to hold together," as Prufer works on a poem that turns out to be this poem. VERDICT This evocative book is recommended for all libraries.--Diane Scharper
Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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