Open Books: Events
September 25, 2009 07:30 PM
JASON WHITMARSH
A shot of espresso, the sudden flare of sunlight off a rearview mirror, the sulfured smoke of a match strike, Jason Whitmarsh's poetry is as sharp, tight, and affecting. His inaugural collection, Tomorrow's Living Room, ($19.95 Utah State University Press) received the 2009 May Swenson Poetry Award. Like Philip Larkin (and even Noel Coward), he uses his agility with formal poetics to illuminate the vagaries of relationships personal and social, never shying from the uncomfortable, the awkward, the less-than-ideal. Bracingly quirky and often darkly wry, the poems zing and sing -- "Change makes news / not with what's new / but by pulling / what's lost into view. / This man today / has another man's face. / Something must / have taken him / or taken place." Punctuating the book are brief prose poems titled "Anniversary," edgy, almost parable-like vignettes that are riveting, unromantic, and ultimately moving.
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