Books

National Anthem
Four Way Books, 2008

from Publishers Weekly…
[STARRED REVIEW ] Anyone with doubts about the place of politics in poetry should have this book thrust in his hands. Prufer (Fallen from a Chariot) writes, “I don't know what to do/ with the doomed, the chilled over and gone,/ but drink until my fingers become twigs.” This powerful collection, makes the political personal and the personal political, all in the service of sinuous, moving free verse. He has a rare gift for bringing the inanimate to life on the page. The American West becomes a drifter on a raft, his chest “brown and flecked with hair,” and the title poem begins with a shopping center calling out like a lover. Elsewhere, ancient Rome, its empire in slow, steady decline, is found “curled on a pew, asleep,” a haunting parallel for contemporary America. Poetry—a possible source of salvation?—is a boy locked in a car's trunk, screaming and refusing to die. And there are people in these poems, too: a speaker who writes love notes he describes as “empty and vaguely/ sad.” Dead children, soldiers and those left behind in an evacuation speak and are spoken about. An absurdly large parachute falls over a suburb, and the speaker writes letters to his lover while trying to find his way out from under it. Near the end of the book, Prufer's fourth, is an ongoing elegy for a dark time in American history.

from The New Yorker…
The America of Prufer’s fourth collection is an empire in decline, a medicated landscape (“snow / like little tranquilizers all over the yard”) peopled by pilgrims to shopping malls. The book opens with a panoramic vision of the aftermath of apocalypse—“expired” cars, silenced TVs, coffins “unmoored and happy with the storm”—but ends intimately, with a child’s memory of his first encounter with death; the thin wire between political failure and personal grief runs taut throughout. In the eerie centerpiece poem, the suburbs are sealed under an enormous parachute, its nylon shimmering; icicles line the seams and crash into the streets, and the narrator walks for days, never finding the edge.

from Library Journal…
The author of four books of poetry (e.g., Fallen from a Chariot) and coeditor of the important anthology New European Poets, Prufer here continues to grapple with human suffering, smudging the border between real and surreal in a kind of imagined poetry of witness: two strangers comb a ravaged war site in search of food, a man who personifies the American West sleeps on a raft, Caesars fill the hospital beds. In the title poem, the speaker waits in a parking lot while his companion finishes shopping: "What was the body but a vessel, and what was the store but another,/ larger vessel?" Often, things are inside of other things: a body inside a car trunk or a man beneath a spread parachute that covers an entire neighborhood. At the core is a boy’s fear of the unknown: "My brother cried at dinner when he learned/ one day he would die. I picked at my food/ and wanted to be a chip on the wall/ or a spot that would not wash away." Recommended for contemporary poetry collections.

More reviews....

The poetry in National Anthem, simply put, is necessary. Gritty and vibrantly-realized, Kevin Prufer’s work is a concretization of an imagined apocalypse—an analysis of the nation's affairs and poignant observations on life in contemporary America ... Prufer has the unique ability to tap into the current state of affairs and the vibe of the national consciousness. But he doesn't stop there. His work transforms the material into something necessary whose lasting benefit speaks to a country in a unique sort of turmoil. —Cynthia Reeser, Prick of the Spindle

Also favorably reviewed in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Kansas City Star, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinal, Miami Herald, and elsewhere.

Poems in National Anthem received the George Bogin Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, the Pushcart Prize, and were the basis for a 2007 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.