University of Pittsburgh Press
Orbit
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Orbit

By Arthur Vogelsang
There's only one Arthur Vogelsang. A seriously playful absurdist, he deflates false authority while underscoring the barbarism of history. In his rangy diction, he underscores our frailties and our incomprehensible and finite existence. In Orbit Vogelsang brings us closer to the tragic comedy of human experience.
Ira Sadoff
Paperback $18.00

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Orbit connects the intimate with what is farthest from us, mixing what we can imagine with what is daily and near. Landscapes stretch from stable and fulfilling domestic interiors to the destiny of our sun as an exploding red giant. That dilemma of human fertility and love facing ultimate destruction is orchestrated by the author’s provocative voice and coiled lines, which fondle and handle the reader’s heart and mind in a bright light. The book insists on connecting the three eras of human experience – Then, Now, and When – at every turn. Orbit continues the unique aesthetic of Vogelsang’s first five award-winning books through its “oddly direct original persona,” its “mind – prophetic, wild, loony,” its “language of surveillance and trembling,” and the poems’ ability “to find and magnify the emotion suddenly, instantaneously” (comments draw from other poets’ reviews.) Vogelsang’s new book Orbit is a dialogue between daily life and transcendent vision, insisting on the reality of each.

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Part vaudevillian, part shaman, Arthur Vogelsang celebrates the tenacious hopes of the hopeless and repeats aloud the snarling prayers of the lost. Voice-driven and maximal, each its own tonal high-wire act, Arthur Vogelsang's poems sear the imagination while either touching or ripping out the reader's heart.

David St. John

Arthur Vogelsang's new collection, Orbit, reminds me of James Joyce's description of the vehement anecdote that is poetry, where speech finds speech in a human continuity that is essential to all literature, but especially to the great wisdom literatures. This is such a surprising and wonderful book.

Norman Dubie

Throughout this collection, Vogelsang navigates delicate balances . . . the majority of the pieces successfully enroll the reader: these poems intrigue much as alien landscapes do; they tempt with the spectacle of alternate worlds; they present linguistic and aesthetic iterations that are compelling for both their tautological nature and playful avoidance of conventional expectations, lines that evoke possibilities beyond the egoic narratives around which most lives unwaveringly resolve.

Colorado Review
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88 Pages, 6 x 9 in.

March, 2016

isbn : 9780822964094

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about the author

Arthur Vogelsang

Arthur Vogelsang is the author of six previous books of poetry, including Twentieth Century Women and Cities and Towns, which received the Juniper Prize. His work has been included in numerous anthologies such as The Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize, The New Breadloaf Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, and American Hybrid. Vogelsang was coeditor of the Norton anthology The Body Electric: America’s Best Poetry from The American Poetry Review. He is the recipient of a California Arts Council fellowship and three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in poetry.

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Arthur Vogelsang