Description

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An unflinching study of death, Kevin Prufer's The Fears invites us to consider what it means to matter.

Editor, publisher, and poet Kevin Prufer presents his ninth poetry collection, The Fears, an intimate meditation on storytelling and mortality. "Ghostlit by streetlights" and filtered through tale and recollection, Prufer examines our fears of loss, death, and obscurity. Narratives are braided together as Prufer manipulates white space to mimic the silence of minds at work on unsolvable problems, how time "unravels / endlessly." Here, visions of classical Greece and the trials of ancient Romans coexist with the everyday--memories of a parent's death or the loss of a pet. We bear witness as the poet writes to preserve the intricacy of his own mind against the "certainty of absence." Exploring what it means to be forgotten and how legacy is preserved through poetry, history books, a mummy's index finger, and love letters from the grave, The Fears invites us to consider what it means to matter.

About the Author

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Kevin Prufer's recent books include The Art of Fiction, Churches, and How He Loved Them, which was long-listed for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize. His work has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lannan Foundation, and the Poetry Society of American and appeared on "best of the year" lists in The New York Times Book Review, Publishers Weekly, BookList, and others. Prufer has also edited or co-edited many volumes, including New European Poetry, Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentary, and Literary Publishing in the 21st Century. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston, where he co-directs The Unsung Masters Series, a book series devoted to bringing great but little-known authors to new generations of readers.