Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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.

Paul Guest is one of the best young contemporary poets writing today. Every poem is so intriguing. His images make me wish I could write as sharp and poignant as him. When reading his poems, you can sense his intelligence, authentic creativity, and sincerity of his personal experience that influences his poetic voice.