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

~ (Author) "Almost I rushed from home to tell you this: that melancholia, the word, when broken down to its roots, its ancient Greek particulars, means black..." (more)

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

Product Description

Winner of the 2002 New Issues Poetry Prize, Campbell McGrath, Judge

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Product Details

• Paperback: 94 pages
• Publisher: New Issues Poetry Press; 1 edition (March 4, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1930974272
• ISBN-13: 978-1930974272
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.9 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 (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #594,271 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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

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 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)

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.