The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World
By Paul Guest

Winner of the 2002 New Issues Poetry Prize
Campbell McGrath, Judge

“Paul Guest’s poems are infused with tenderness toward the world despite its harsh indifference toward us. Literally and metaphorically, these are poems scratched out with a stick held between the teeth. And they manage to fashion, from life’s rough lot, testaments of good faith to the flesh, the world, the word, and love in all its various garments.”

         —Lucia Perillo

“Filled with irony, fantastic leaps of imagination and a poetic maturity most poets don’t achieve for several books, this incredible debut works dialectically to resurrect our world among all its broken bodies. Here is a voice smart enough and sentient enough to know that the pain and the love of that world are two sides of the proverbial coin—a poet who, like Stevens’ eagle, clearly sees the infinite alps of our emotions as a single nest.”

         —Richard Jackson

“From my first encounter with Paul Guest’s poetry, I have thought of him as one of the most brilliant poets in America. His gifts are many: lyrical spontaneity, quirky inventiveness, profundity, emotional wisdom, and unfailing lucidity. His poems bring at once both range and focus, wit and seriousness. Indeed, Guest makes no distinction between light and dark subject matter. The accomplishment of his poems translates everything into delight.”

         —Rodney Jones

“Grunst is an admirable craftsperson with a fine, discriminating ear.”

         —Vince Gotera, North American Review

"This prize-winner first collection by poet Paul Guest emerses the reader in a passionate physicality and a sensibility that can encompass both Ovid and the cartoon character Foghorn Leghorn, in a writing style that is relaxed and assured. Paralysed in a cycling accident at age 12, Guest does not shy away in his poetry from the consequences of living with his disability, in such poems as 'For a Long Time I Have Wanted to Write a Handi-Capable Poem' or 'Litany' where 'what we would keep // as best we could: [is] our bodies.' Guest draws us into his life without demanding sympathy but rather our unflenching witness, saying in 'On My Failed Epic:'Like shark's teeth, these poems startle.' They also impress with lyrical grace and compassionate engagement in this cruel, funny, yet ultimately sustaining world."

         —LitRag

New Issues Poetry & Prose, Western Michigan University, Dept. of English,
1903 W. Michigan Ave., Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5331
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