The Animals All Are Gathering

In this original and wonderfully energetic book, Bradley Paul moves from humor to mockery to play to anger to grief, and sometimes all at once. This poetry shifts, it slams, it hammers, it thinks; it corrodes our sorrow and foolishness; it captures our national haplessness, sad and firing and still.

Jean Valentine

Winner, 2009 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry

Winner of the 2009 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry

These poems address issues of death and personal crisis by filtering them through an obsession with monsters and animals. After an initial loss, the speaker of these poems tries to utilize different personae—monsters, people stuck in horror movies—before turning his attention to the dreamlike animals that stalk him. Eventually, the speaker tries to resolve the conflicts among the figures by creating a cobbled-together garden in which they can coexist.

More Praise

This is a book of 'Instructions,' a 'How to' book, a 'Guide' to the anarchic carnival of everyday life. It is a wicked book smelling of 'scrapple' and the 'puke of poetry.' And yet rising out of the bile is something else—call it a love for words and poetry—that can gleefully announce that 'a monkey could write this poem.' Read this book and you will learn 'how to stop your doppelgŠnger from plagiarizing you,' which is exactly what you need to know to live in the twenty-first century.

John Yau

Table of Contents

Sample

96 Pages, 5.5 x 8 in.

September, 2010

isbn : 9780822961215

Series

Pitt Poetry Series

Subjects

about the author

Bradley Paul’s books include The Obvious (selected by Brenda Hillman for the New Issues Poetry Prize) and The Animals All Are Gathering (winner of the 2009 Donald Hall Prize of poetry). His poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Smartish Pace, Fence, Pleiades, Iowa Review, and more. A native of Baltimore, Paul lives in Los Angeles, where he writes for television.

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