The Captain Lands in Paradise: Poems [Paperback]

Sarah Manguso (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2002

Sarah Manguso’s first collection, a combination of verse and prose poems, explores love, nostalgia, remorse, and the joyful and mysterious preparation for the discoveries of new lands, selves, and ideas. The voice is consistently spare, honest, understated, and eccentric.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

"Sarah Manguso's poems weirdly plumb and strikingly frame what we're up against: the now in which the Muse drives a silver pickup, mystery only announces itself out of grief for us, and to reach harbor is to understand there will be no end of searching. Hers is a startling, disturbing, and original voice." --Carl Phillips

"At times disarmingly straightforward, at others elegantly convoluted, Sarah Manguso's poems evade and persuade us of the perils and fleshed restitutions of the imaging, mortal life. Again and again, their language inhabits the cusp between playfulness and dark revelation, between gaming and cri de coeur so we are torn, reading, between consolation and alarm. With an apocalyptic exuberance as well as the clarity of truthful recall, The Captain Lands in Paradise has an impact that belies its marvelously deft touch." --Dean Young

About the Author

Born in 1974, Sarah Manguso grew up in Massachusetts and was educated at Harvard University and the University of Iowa. Her poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, Boston Review, Chicago Review, The New Republic, and many other journals. She lives in Brooklyn.

Product Details

• Paperback: 72 pages
• Publisher: Alice James Books; 1ST edition (January 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1882295331
• ISBN-13: 978-1882295333
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,201,696 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Sarah Manguso's most recent book is The Guardians: An Elegy (2012). Her memoir, The Two Kinds of Decay (2008), was named an Editors' Choice by the New York Times Sunday Book Review and was short-listed for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize. Her other books include the story collection Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape (2007), included in in McSweeney's One Hundred and Forty-Five Stories in a Small Box, and the poetry collections Siste Viator (2006) and The Captain Lands in Paradise (2002), which was named a Favorite Book of the Year by the Village Voice. Honors for her writing include a Hodder Fellowship and the Rome Prize. A citizen of the United States and Ireland, she lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wit and surprise, December 2, 2006

By 

Driver9 (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Captain Lands in Paradise: Poems (Paperback)

It's not often in the world of Amazonia that one finds a work of art that has received five star reviews from every reviewer. But Sarah Manguso truly deserves the accolades. Her poems are sinewy and funny and unpredictable (until you memorize them). What a deft hand she has in crafting these gems. I agree with the reviewer who lamented so much of modern poetry's self-seriousness. Well, you won't find that here. And yet, for me she is a poet to be taken very seriously, if you know what I mean.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars She knows what she's talking about, July 31, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Captain Lands in Paradise: Poems (Paperback)

Manguso's voice is conversational and declaratory, seeking--and finding--truth in luminous, mysterious metaphors. "Sometimes I think I understand the way things work/ and then I find out that on Neptune it rains diamonds," Manguso writes in "Beautiful Things." She has learned much about the way things work, and she has much to teach us. She is unafraid to make the important discoveries. Reading her poems is traveling on an important, sometimes frightening, journey with a trusted guide.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars on Neptune it rains diamonds, July 25, 2002

By 

"bezreh" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Captain Lands in Paradise: Poems (Paperback)

The Captain Lands in Paradise opened up a whole new kind of poetry to me. The poems are spare, witty and pure precision. They contain inalienable truths like "Either a thing will happen or it won't" which has become a mantra for me whenever I'm freaking out. There is something very sober and fearless there. There is no... and no hiding in vagueness, each poem is urgently clear even when it takes you to Neptune. The precision makes the reader feel like he matters. Like giant things are being communicated with great economy, with no time to waste.