Because Everything Is Terrible

Paul Guest is the author of four volumes of poetry and a memoir. His debut, The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World, was awarded the 2002 New Issues Poetry Prize. His second collection, Notes for My Body Double, was awarded the 2006 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. His third collection, My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge, was published by Ecco Press/ HarperCollins in 2008. His poems have appeared in Harper's, The Paris Review, Poetry, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. His memoir, One More Theory About Happiness, was published by Ecco and selected for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting Writers' Award, Guest teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Virginia.

With vital, pulsating, elegiac poems that puncture the world with their tenderness and awful truths, Guest has once again proven he's a brilliant poet raging both against and in defense of the world. Here are shiver-inducing poems that look steadily into our current destructive times and still manage to sing of love, desire, of something worth saving.
Ada Limón

This splendid new collection by Paul Guest begins with a trumpet blast-two blasts, actually, with the first poem describing a post-apocalyptic world from which words have disappeared and the second addressing America as Allen Ginsberg might, saying "America, you know / the words; sing them with me." Alternating between sound and silence, ecstasy and despair, Guest struggles as he takes on "this emergency we call life," yet he finds much more to praise than to lament. That doesn't mean that praise comes easily: "It is terrifying / to unhinge my mouth," he says, "but I do." The old Greeks would have called these passionate, noisy poems dithyrambs. I call them contemporary poetry at its very best.
David Kirby