The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World (New Issues Poetry & Prose) [Paperback]

Paul Guest (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1930974272 | ISBN-13: 978-1930974272 | Publication Date: March 4, 2003 | Edition: 1

Poetry. "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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"...this incredible debut works dialectically to resurrect our world among all its broken bodies. " -- —Richard Jackson

"From my first encounter... I have thought of him as one of the most brilliant poets in America. " -- —Rodney Jones

"Paul Guest’s poems are infused with tenderness toward the world despite its harsh indifference toward us." -- —Lucia Perillo

About the Author

Paul Guest was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and raised in Georgia. He received a B.A. in Humanities from the University of Tennessee and an M.F.A. from Southern Illinois University. His poems have appeared in Slate, The Iowa Review, Mid-American Review, Pleiades, Quarterly West, Third Coast, and elsewhere. He currently teaches at the University of Alabama.

Product Details

• Paperback: 94 pages
• Publisher: New Issues Poetry & Prose; 1 edition (March 4, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1930974272
• ISBN-13: 978-1930974272
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 6 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,338,827 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Paul Guest is the author of three volumes of poetry and a forthcoming memoir. His debut, The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World, was awarded the 2002 New Issues Poetry Prize. His second collection, Notes for My Body Double, was awarded the 2006 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. His third collection, My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge, was published by Ecco Press in 2008. His poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. His memoir, One More Theory About Happiness, will be published by Ecco in May 2010. The recipient of a 2007 Whiting Writers' Award, Guest lives in Atlanta, Georgia. Visit his website at http://paulguest.net

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dark, haunting, April 28, 2003

By 

Daniel Morris (Brisbane, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World (New Issues Poetry & Prose) (Paperback)

Paul Guest writes stark, knifelike poems. Each one is a perfect, shivering cataclysm. Guest's understated voice is a monologue of unraveling, the effect culminating until you're left laughing giddily in a kind of shock. This collection reads sort of like a 94-page "The Second Coming". I think it's great.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars In Case of Rapture, March 23, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World (New Issues Poetry & Prose) (Paperback)

This book should be taken with you or taken up after the reader--no doubt enraptured in awe and swept-off--dropped it. These poems are pathos gift-wrapped in the comic and the human. The book has authority, the heft and agility rarely encountered in first books. These poems are beautiful in the way that "Great Poetry" can be beautiful but they are spoken in a voice so natural, so conversational that their beauty seems organic to them: that daffodil that opens early and braves frost and seems to stand not so much for the pretty-flowers-of-early-spring-and-The-Poet-behind-lace-curtains-billowing(& bellowing)-out-of "daffodil poetry" but to stand sturdy and against ice and bitterness in a gravel parking lot of a world and in so doing surprises even itself by its ability to perservere. These poems are about brokeness and bodies and the way bodies break and refuse to break. They are beauty unaware of their own beauty, aware only of a world in need of saving graces and madcap comics, of failed scripts for the three stooges. They are poems of awareness, unflinching in their measure of pain and bliss, their acknowledgement that to be human is to arrive with the potential and promise of erosion. For that awareness of what is offered and what cannot always be accepted, there is this voice, this rapturous debut and this poetry which is, (read this book and see for yourself) no small wonder.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Guest hits right chord, July 26, 2005

By 

McCracken Poston "Reader" (Ringgold, GA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World (New Issues Poetry & Prose) (Paperback)

Paul Guest is a wonderful surprise. Emerging from the rural/suburban South, he paints in the most simple terms and references to the icons of the region the complex picture that actually exists.
He is the poet laureate of the Wal-Mart South. Exposure to pain and suffering are part and parcel of the total experience here, and yet most find a way to move on. Much is said in the well-chosen few words that this poet crafts into vivid imagery. I eagerly await his next work.