The first broad retrospective of August Kleinzahler’s career, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City gathers poems from his major works along with a rich portion of new poems that visit different voice registers, experiment with form and length, and confirm Kleinzahler as among the most inventive and brilliant poets of our time. Travel—actual and imaginary—remains a passion and inspiration, and in these pages the poet also finds “This sanctified ground / Here, yes, here / The dead solid center of the universe / At the heart of the heart of America.”
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. The witty, gritty poet and memoirist Kleinzahler (The Strange Hours Travellers Keep) has produced chiseled, sometimes curt and finely observed free verse for decades. Kleinzahler has lived in Montreal, San Francisco, Vancouver, Portugal and Berlin; his sketches of characters and places from at least four continents include affectionately cynical portraits of hoodlums, odes to the autumn failures of baseball teams and swiftly cinematic depictions of Tartar hordes in medieval Europe, ripping the ears off hussars. Hackensack, N.J.; the foggy Bay Area with its foggier ex-hippies; and northern European lakes and mountains all receive their due in a poetry that aspires to the feel of bebop and the delight of travel writing, that never bores and rarely repeats itself. New poems add to, rather than swerve away from, Kleinzahler's strengths in close observation and all-over-the-map diction, from slang to technical terms. Overheard speech in Above Gower Street, a poem about the loneliness of international travel, ranges from an answering machine's anodyne messages to an explicit sexual come-on; in Vancouver, the neon mermaid over the fish place/ looks best that way, in the rain. This ninth book of poems and first trade press new-and-selected should bring this master of free verse lines even more admirers. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
Praise for The Strange Hours Travelers Keep:
"[Kleinzahler's] scope is large, his diction wildly exact, his line inventive, his means varied, and he never condescends." --Maureen N. McLane, The New York Times Book Review
"Erudite, restless, intellectually curious, alert to what goes on around him from the moment he opens his eyes in the morning, [Kleinzahler] brings to mind Frank O'Hara . . . Wonderful." --Charles Simic, The New York Review of Books
"Kleinzahler mixes the pungent and the delicate, the literary and the colloquial, to create a fine, technicolor-like excess." --John Palattella, The Los Angeles Times
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18 of 20 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
I discovered August Kleinzahler when I became intrigued by an article based on an interview with him in the New York Times a couple of years ago, and then read a poem on-line that made me draw in my breath because he'd described an experience so precisely that I recognized everything about it. I immediately ordered Green Sees Things In Waves, a book that pleased me no end, and now I have ordered and received Sleeping It Off in Rapid City--a beautiful book physically, and one which is also a volume of truly excellent poems. Some of my favourites so far (I'm just finishing Section I) are "Shoot The Freak" and "A Valentine: Regarding the Impracticability of Our Love." In addition to his magical way with words and images, I love the way Kleinzahler keeps the quotidian with him when he writes: it is everywhere in his poems, not crushing his work, but rather informing it. Or, to be more precise, it is as though he brings popular culture and day-to-day events up against larger issues, thereby revealing everything in a new way.
Take the genius of "I went to see McCarthy," in which the narrator lifts off by plane from a sere mid-west America to revisit "old arguments" in Ireland. He leaves behind "a parched bare land of yellow ochre" and enters Ireland ("swaddled in cloud, all grey and green"). The poem reveals McCarthy's town and his country in the way one might buff a brass image--going over the same area until its shape is gradually made bare and deeply shining. Through echoed images and repeated phrases, still trailing bits of the flat and dry Midwest behind us, we gradually enter the green land, its past and its way of telling stories--gradually enter until we are totally immersed in green. In green and green--learning as we go about the heroic battles that are required to come up with a good pat of Skibbereen butter, and that if something sounds good when you say it once, you might as well say it twice.
So I will: Kleinzahler writes fine poems.
Take the genius of "I went to see McCarthy," in which the narrator lifts off by plane from a sere mid-west America to revisit "old arguments" in Ireland. He leaves behind "a parched bare land of yellow ochre" and enters Ireland ("swaddled in cloud, all grey and green"). The poem reveals McCarthy's town and his country in the way one might buff a brass image--going over the same area until its shape is gradually made bare and deeply shining. Through echoed images and repeated phrases, still trailing bits of the flat and dry Midwest behind us, we gradually enter the green land, its past and its way of telling stories--gradually enter until we are totally immersed in green. In green and green--learning as we go about the heroic battles that are required to come up with a good pat of Skibbereen butter, and that if something sounds good when you say it once, you might as well say it twice.
So I will: Kleinzahler writes fine poems.
11 of 17 people found the following review helpful
By Mark Cannon
Format:Hardcover
If you love poetry, get this book. Kleinzahler is the real deal. If you are tired of the slam poetry culture or the "Everyone is an artist" aspect of American pop culture, you will love Kleinzahler. He has the essential quality of all good poets: he is in love with words, drunk with them. If you are tired of the poetry slam "Everyone is an artist" mediocrity of so much American culture today, you will love Kleinzahler.
This is poetry to be relished, read aloud, read to people you love. Such a joy to read him. Believe it or not, there are poets who have an ear, understand how words can sing, and actually can count syllables, can rhyme, and have read poetry that is more than 10 years old.
This is poetry to be relished, read aloud, read to people you love. Such a joy to read him. Believe it or not, there are poets who have an ear, understand how words can sing, and actually can count syllables, can rhyme, and have read poetry that is more than 10 years old.
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