In this book-length sonnet sequence, Kelly Cherry explores the philosophical domain, addressing classic questions, raising new ones, and sometimes doing philosophy in fourteen lines. A former philosophy student in graduate school, she retains a deep love of philosophical inquiry and maintains that our lives are intimately bound to the philosophical choices we make. Conscious study of our choices, Cherry believes, can lead to greater freedom. Passionate, skeptical, witty, and sometimes wry, these succinct poems concern themselves with very large matters--the nature of time, the definitions of goodness and beauty, the aims of art, our limited knowledge of the world--and illustrate with aching clarity that philosophical problems dominate our lives as does the sky.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Kelly Cherry is the author of twenty books of fiction (long and short), poetry, memoir, essay, and criticism. She has also published eight chapbooks and translations of two classical dramas. Her most recent titles are The Woman Who: Stories, The Retreats of Thought: Poems, and Girl in a Library: On Women Writers & The Writing Life. Her fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, and New Stories from the South and has won three PEN/Syndicated Fiction awards. Her story collection The Society of Friends (which has nothing to do with the Society of Friends) received the Dictionary of Literary Biography Award for Short Fiction for the best collection published in 1999. For her poetry she received the Hanes Prize for a body of work. Her new and selected poems, titled Hazard and Prospect, was a finalist for the Poets' Award. Cherry says, "I write because I have ideas that can be realized only by writing. Luckily, I love to write. And I love the thought that somewhere there may be someone who reads my work and responds to the heart of what I write."
Another book of poems is scheduled for 2013. She is completing a new book of stories and working on a book-length poem. After that there will be another book of stories (the third in her trilogy of short story collections set in Madison, Wisconsin), a memoir, and a novel.
