Sleeping It Off in Rapid City: Poems, New and Selected

by August Kleinzahler

Book Overview

The first broad retrospective of August Kleinzahler's career, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City gathers poems from his major works along with a rich portion of new poems that visit different voice registers, experiment with form and length, and confirm Kleinzahler as among the most inventive and brilliant poets of our time. Travel--actual and imaginary--remains a passion and inspiration, and in these pages the poet also finds "This sanctified ground /...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374531730
• ISBN13: 9780374531737
• Release Date: March 2009
• Publisher: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux-3pl
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.78 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Mark Cannon

If you love poetry, get this book. Kleinzahler is the real deal. If you are tired of the slam poetry culture or the "Everyone is an artist" aspect of American pop culture, you will love Kleinzahler. He has the essential quality of all good poets: he is in love with words, drunk with them. If you are tired of the poetry slam "Everyone is an artist" mediocrity of so much American culture today, you will love Kleinzahler. This is poetry to be relished, read aloud, read to people you love. Such a joy to read him. Believe it or not, there are poets who have an ear, understand how words can sing, and actually can count syllables, can rhyme, and have read poetry that is more than 10 years old.

Kleinzahler Writes Fine Poems

I discovered August Kleinzahler when I became intrigued by an article based on an interview with him in the New York Times a couple of years ago, and then read a poem on-line that made me draw in my breath because he'd described an experience so precisely that I recognized everything about it. I immediately ordered Green Sees Things In Waves, a book that pleased me no end, and now I have ordered and received Sleeping It Off in Rapid City--a beautiful book physically, and one which is also a volume of truly excellent poems. Some of my favourites so far (I'm just finishing Section I) are "Shoot The Freak" and "A Valentine: Regarding the Impracticability of Our Love." In addition to his magical way with words and images, I love the way Kleinzahler keeps the quotidian with him when he writes: it is everywhere in his poems, not crushing his work, but rather informing it. Or, to be more precise, it is as though he brings popular culture and day-to-day events up against larger issues, thereby revealing everything in a new way. Take the genius of "I went to see McCarthy," in which the narrator lifts off by plane from a sere mid-west America to revisit "old arguments" in Ireland. He leaves behind "a parched bare land of yellow ochre" and enters Ireland ("swaddled in cloud, all grey and green"). The poem reveals McCarthy's town and his country in the way one might buff a brass image--going over the same area until its shape is gradually made bare and deeply shining. Through echoed images and repeated phrases, still trailing bits of the flat and dry Midwest behind us, we gradually enter the green land, its past and its way of telling stories--gradually enter until we are totally immersed in green. In green and green--learning as we go about the heroic battles that are required to come up with a good pat of Skibbereen butter, and that if something sounds good when you say it once, you might as well say it twice. So I will: Kleinzahler writes fine poems.