The Age of Discovery

Product Description Playful and inventive, The Age of Discovery is a work of enduring beauty filled with tenderness and surprise. Alan Michael Parker’s latest collection puts him amongst poets such as Amichai, Mistral and Neruda, adding a new voice to the greats of love poetry. Innovative in form, Parker challenges the reader to go beyond the comforts of nostalgia. “The boarded-up video store/makes sadness look pretty”, he writes, suggesting that change can be surprisingly redeeming in many circumstances.These poems take note of the time of day, carrying the reader through the many moods accompanying each hour. A resolute sense of the present day lingers as well, as Parker roams from the Biblical to the digital. This investigation of loneliness and change over time is sure to create a sense of where we stand in this new digital age; possibly closer to love than ever before. Review The Age of Discovery is a devastating take on the ways we stave off panic. Mythic, precise as a statistician, Alan Michael Parker eyes the virtual data, “bottomless as coffee”; the culture, on the cusp of cancellation. (“I love you more with every hit,” he writes, both acknowledgment and threat.) Parker lays bare the limits of nostalgia, where “the boarded-up video store / makes sadness look pretty”― the farce that art transforms, and the truth of it, too. In The Age of Discovery, Alan Michael Parker, line by startling line, has written a wry, deeply humane collection for our uncivil age. --Randall MannWith The Age of Discovery, Alan Michael Parker locates a new register. Throughout this collection are poems that resonate with humor blending through heartbreak, that sound this poet’s singular voice, and that, ultimately, sustain with Parker’s signature, enviable imagination. --Jon Pineda, Little Anodynes and Let’s No One Get Hurt About the Author ALAN MICHAEL PARKER is the author or editor of eighteen books, including three collections of poems with Tupelo Press as well as four novels; he teaches at Davidson College.