Overview
With uncanny wit, inventive beauty, and numinous surprise, The Most Charming Creatures explores the contemporary and its language, considering our wonder, sorrow, bewilderment, anxiety, and tenderness. While these poems energize and connect and āturn the paren- / theses inside out so that / we mean everything,ā they are also alive to the alluring complicity of language and its duplicity and deceptions. āThis is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but / while we watch.ā
A follow-up to the award-winning authorās acclaimed selected poems, this new collection continues Barwinās examination of the possibilities of the poem: a celebration, a story, an investigation, a riff, a word machine, a parable, a transformation. But what are the āmost charming creaturesā of the title? In 1862, scientific illustrator Ernst Haeckel termed radiolarians (ancient single-celled organisms with mineral skeletons) āthe most charming creatures,ā but here Barwin turns the microscope around to consider something just as strange and mysterious: language, our culture, and the self. From microorganisms, onion rings, grief, and Gerard Manley Hopkins to beetles, neoliberalism, sandwiches, Martin Luther, and stand-up comedy, he offers: āitās a miracle that weāve survived / itās a miracle that weāve survived at all.ā
This book title, The Most Charming Creatures, ISBN: 9781770416611, by Gary Barwin, published by ECW Press (September 20, 2022) is available in paperback. Our minimum order quantity is 25 copies. All standard bulk book orders ship FREE in the continental USA and delivered in 4-10 business days.
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