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Books
Released April, 2011!

In A
Beautiful Country
Four Way Books, 2011
An American
Poet/Academy of American
Poets Notable Book for 2011!
Finalist, The 2011 Rilke Prize for
the best book by a mid-career American poet!
Finalist,
The 2013 Poets' Prize for
the best book by an American poet!
Advance
word from Library Journal…
Pleiades editor-at-large Kevin Prufer
nails our sense of loss in a nation numbed by mall sprawl and horror
movies, even as the military builds up and up.
Advance
word from Publishers Weekly…
Death
or violence occurs in nearly every poem in Prufer's latest, enabling
and sometimes forcing the poet to locate what is beautiful in what is
otherwise tragic. "You were burning so thoughtfully in the field," he
writes in "The Failure of Parents to Survive Their Children," "like a
horse who,/ running from a flaming barn…sets the grass afire/ as
he passes through it." Prufer proves himself a master at maintaining an
emotional distance from his images--"he is far away, and, anyway, this
is only a dead girl"--that renders them as stark as they are gorgeous.
Though Prufer, on rare occasions, can be so clinical with an image that
it feels like little more than "a picture in a book," the timing and
precision of his lineation and enjambment keep each of the book's
four-poem sequences operating at a pitch that is always crisp. By
peppering traditional and formal verse throughout--rhymed sonnets,
artes poeticae, love poems, an elegy--Prufer attempts to locate a form
and a place for violence within the history of poetry, the effect of
which is most moving when this violence is woven into a strand that is
personal, political, and so close one feels one can touch it.
from American Poet: The Journal of the
Academy of American Poets…
Kevin
Prufer's arresting fifth book examines the possibilities of and for
love within a deeply complicated cultural moment. A natural follow up
to the themes in his previous collection, National Anthem, the poems of
In a
Beautiful Country are
meditations on one's connection to faith, love, and country— and
the loss of all three of these ideals.
In the poem "To the 20th Century" Prufer personifies
the period, ending on a stark note:
And if it finds no comfort from your visit,
put a pillow to its mouth, and, so, be
done with it.
Poetic tradition is also front and center in the collection; in terms
of subject matter, Prufer critiques a romanticized view of art while
asserting it as an essential value in our country's history. Also
notable is Prufer's skillful use of traditional form; the presence of
rhyme, meter, sonnets, and artes poeticae creates a complex and rich
collection.
from The Georgia Review…
The
big question remains: what can
poetry do in a degraded world? At the end of the present century, an
anthologist may provide the answer, but for now one can only predict
that Prufer's unsettling prophecies will have staying power. There is
no other contemporary voice quite like his, and I believe that, taken
as a whole, Kevin Prufer's prognostic backward gaze may someday prove
to have shown us where we were going before we got there..... —Judith Kitchen
from Field: Contemporary Poetry &
Poetics…
Kevin
Prufer is one of the most vital poets on his generation, saying
important things about our culture in fearless, eloquent ways. —David Walker
from Notre Dame Review…
Among
the best poets in the USA....
from Rattle…
An
absolute mesmerizing pleasure to read [...] rich with images at turns
beautiful, disturbing, vivid and voluptuous. —Nick
DePascal
from Houston Press…
Prufer
... daringly writes beautiful verse (sometimes using traditional forms,
even rhyme schemes, in this day and age!) about devotion and ugly
self-deception, making large claims about our new century, the recently
deceased last century, the wars we are waging, and the manipulation of
our affections by the mass media and our own government. —Hank
Hancock
from Notre Dame Review…
Since Fallen From
a Chariot (2005), ... Kevin Prufer has gone on in National
Anthem (2008)
and the present volume to complete an impressive trilogy of post-9/11
books that demonstrates how a deep vision and an often stunning
lyricism need not be incompatible in poetry. Marie Howe spoke of the
“courage and compassion” of his poems in National Anthem, adding that his
poems “should be read on Fox News and CNN.” The poems in In a
Beautiful Country
would be too much for either, but his treatment of love and art in the
context of contemporary history and the imperatives of moral witness
should be read in our hearts. Prufer is an absolutely necessary poet.
from California Journal of Poetics…
Kevin
Prufer’s fifth collection of poetry, In a
Beautiful Country, depicts
a startling landscape that is eroded by war, violence, grief, and
alienation. Prufer populates this landscape with a variety of
voices–a merciless God, a grieving son, a war veteran, and
speakers alternately buried alive and witnessing decay. The wide vocal
and thematic scope of this collection speak to Prufer’s breadth
of vision, something he addresses directly in the poem “Distant
Strangers” when he urges the reader, “Take a catalog, if
you’d like, / though the color reproductions / can’t quite
capture / the scope of my enormous project.” The enormity of his
project does not startle the reader as much as the moments when Prufer
transforms familiar images into unsettling starkness. In his country of
charred trees, falling angels, missiles and bombs, and perpetual
snowstorms, “boys idle in pick-ups / while a spring rain dots
their windshields / with a million tiny bombs.” Over the course
of the book, the poems themselves become the angels that “crashed
through the trees, / so the yard was a scatter / of bent, failing
bodies.” —M.
Zobel
from The Bloomsbury Review…
Kevin
Prufer is one of our best poets from the younger generation who still
believe in the pure power of the lyric, the rhythm, and the force of
the voice. His poetry sheers the top off any fancy notions of restless
form to reveal simply what is crucial in poetic experiences where
language sings off the page. Poems such as “Transparent
Cities,” “Little Paper Sacrifice,” and “In a
Beautiful Country” speak to an audience who understands what
great poetry does. This is one of the best books of 2011: Kevin
Prufer’s poems dwell in a world that spins off into many
dimensions where writer and reader meet in the magic of poetry.
from Mixer…
Prufer
shatters images of the loving, darling and angelic, and tosses them
like broken shards of glass to be crushed under the feet of their
traditional definitions. —Allison Harden Moen
________

Wir wollten Amerika
finden: ausgewählte Gedichte
A
bilingual volume of selected poems translated into German
by Norbert Lange and Susanna Mewe
LuxBooks Verlag, 2011
from Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung…
Prufers
Ars poetica ist nicht im Avant-garde-Sinn innovativ, dafuer
zugaenglich, erprobt, variantenreich und voll Witz, den wiederum
kulturpessimistische Melancholie kontrastiert. In
verhaeltnismaeßig konventioneller Praxis werden oft Bilder und
Geschichten von ueberraschender Evidenz heraufbeschworen. Kevin Prufer
ist nicht naiv, aber er hintertreibt die Popkultur mit ihren eigenen
Mitteln. Sei ne Rollen--und Erzaehlgedichte, Liebeslieder, Lamentos,
Protokolle, Karikaturen und Entlarvungen inszenieren ein Kino
posturbaner Landschaften mit stets wechselnden Staffagen und Dekors.
Sprechblasen, die irgendjemand Beliebigem gehoeren, tauchen anstelle
von Dialogen auf. Es sind Montagen von Zeichen-, Stimm- und Dingresten,
die „im Licht ihrer fehlenden Erklaerung baden“ (Godard).
Das Fehlende aeußert sich in Phantom- schmerz, Laehmung,
Aggression – oder aus blauem Himmel aufblitzender
Verheißung, die dann doch wieder zum Herz der amerikanischen
Poesie fuehrt. Dann entfaltet sie auch noch in der Uebersetzung,
manchmal gebrochen und unscharf, ihren ureigensten Sound, der Raum und
Weite enthaelt. —Jan
Roehnert
from Die Welt…
Amerika,
das neue Rom, aber wer sind seine Barbaren ?
Das Buch beginnt mit einem Countdown und entfesselt bei Zero eine
Apokalypse. Mit geplatzten Träumen kennt sich aus, wer - wie der
1969 geborene Kevin Prufer - in Houston, Texas lebt. Die hier
vorliegende Auswahl zeigt ihn als einen popmodernen politischen
Dichter, der den gegenwärtigen Alltag Amerikas an den
Demokratie-Entwürfen der Väter misst. In seinen auf ganze
Sätze bauenden Versen erfindet er Bilder und Geschichten, die den
"American Dream" zu bewahren suchen.
In einem Katastrophenfilm aus Montagen inszeniert er ein Amerika voller
Gewalt und aus der Ferne gesteuerten Kriegen. Geschichte wird als
Geschichte von Vertreibung und Unmündigkeit begriffen. Im Gedicht
"Jüngste Geschichte" fallen die Engel gar zerstiebend in Nachbars
Garten, der auch der verwüstete Garten Eden sein könnte. Der
Bürger ist nur ein ohnmächtiger oder teilnahmsloser
Zuschauer. Etliche Verse ziehen Parallelen zum Untergang Roms. Die
neuen Cäsaren trachten - laut Prufer - danach, ein weiteres
"Imperium auf Gold und Sklaven" zu errichten. Gleich dreimal stellt der
Autor zwischen Rollengedichten, Protokollen und Satiren die Frage: "Wer
sind unsere Barbaren?" Angst geht um.
Diese Gedichte wirken wie eine Inventur gesellschaftlicher Konflikte
und Entwicklungen. Zwischen Lähmung, Aggression und Flucht in den
Rausch bewegen sich die lyrischen Figuren. "Was wir mit dem Imperium
gemacht haben" ist der Titel eines Gedichts, das als Groteske
daherkommt. Prufers Ars Poetica spielt auf der Flöte eines an
seinen Rändern messerscharfen Knochens Wahrheit, der dennoch "die
Süße fortsingt". Er schreibt Liebesbriefe ins Nichts. Trotz
schwergewichtiger Themen leben die Verse von der Karikatur und vom Witz..
—Dorothea von Törne
__________

National Anthem
Four Way
Books, 2008
One of Publishers
Weekly's Five
Best Poetry Books of 2008!
Citation:
A rare poetry collection: as angry and ironic over the state of
contemporary America—figured here as a great classical empire in
decline—as it is funny and perversely pleasurable.
Best
book of the Year—Virginia Quarterly Review!
Citation:
This is the collection of the year so far as I’m concerned. These
poems look back on America from a not-so-distant future during and
after the apocalypse that toppled our empire. Prufer’s speaker
shuttles between anger and ironic bemusement as he catalogs visions of
destruction and the survival of the worst of us. When the speaker sets
off to find what’s left of America, for example, only the Motel 6
and Waffle House seem to be thriving. It’s like Omega Man meets
The Waste Land—which is to say that’s it’s a biting
social critique of our times, but it also feels legitimately visionary
(and scary). —Ted
Genoways & VQR
Finalist,
the 2010 Poets' Prize!
A 2008
"Notable Book"—Poetry International!
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.
from Ploughshares…
Kevin
Prufer’s terrific fourth collection exposes a nightmare straight from the head of Walt Whitman. In
it, America sings a democratic song of distress, with no one, or thing,
denied suffering or a voice: not the moon, nor minor politicians,
shopping centers or the book’s most prevalent speaker, an
‘I’ without biography, who transcribes societal and
environmental break-down via tropes suggestive of the post-apocalyptic
scenarios of Mad Max and television’s “Jericho,” of
the conquer-n-collapse history of the Roman age. —Dana
Levin
from
The Antioch
Review…
Clearly, National
Anthem confirms,
once again, that Prufer's voice is one of the most original and
powerful of his generation.
—Jane Satterfield
from The Georgia Review
These
are political poems, but unlike many other contemporary poems, they are
not limited by circumstance. Instead, they are visionary.
—Judith Kitchen
from Colorado Review…
A
beautiful poetry…like the best love songs, the poems in this
book are absolutely fearless, and demand respect—fearless because
they promise to be the voice of a people, demanding respect because
they succeed.
—David Doran
from Prairie Schooner…
If
the dark prospect portrayed in National
Anthem strikes
us as grim and worrisome, then perhaps, like old Ebenezer Scrooge, we
had best commit ourselves to altering these shadows of "things to come"
before they unfold themselves to our peril. This, after all, is why we
have poets—and why we need them.
—Stephen Behrendt
from Oxford American…
[From "Ten
Great Novels of the Apocalypse [and one book of poems]": And here, for
good measure, is one last book, which missed the above list only
because it is not a novel: National
Anthem by Kevin Prufer (apocalypse by enjambment): This is the
one (good) post-apocalyptic poetry collection I know. There are no
hands rising from the soil here, no horror-movie contrivances, but even
the most naturalistic poems seem touched with a terrible wreckage, as
if everything were occurring after the world had been torn to pieces.
The opening lines of "We Wanted to Find America" are representative of
the book's tone of frightening moss-lit elegy:
We wanted to find America through the gasps of snow
that fell like last century's angels—
And the starving horses, their shanks brittled over with ice—
And the moon atop its brilliant derrick, and the poor burning so
beautifully in the oilfields.
As we drove, their cries lit the wind with wailing
and you said, This isn't America into the truck's dark cab and
turned the radio loud.
—Kevin Brockmeier
from Contemporary Poetry Review…
I
hope to be alive in the year 2038 (I don’t ask for 2048) and I
hope to be living an American life in which we still have our
well-stocked supermarkets, and our rooms full of books, a life in which
we are not divided into tribes desperately fighting to survive in the
junkyards and ruins left by the collapse of empire, and I hope to then
pick up National Anthem and smile at its quaintness, its fever-dream
exaggerations of solvable problems ... be amused by its presumption
that we today endure the ultimate in deracination and alienation. But I
think, and fear, that National Anthem—delving as it does into the
caverns below hipness—has a much better chance of ringing true to
those serious readers whom I keep trying to believe in and who go by
the name of posterity. —Mark
Halliday
from American Book Review…
Prufer's
complex and utterly beautiful National
Anthem haunts
and proclaims in subtle ways that recover the possibility of the
American epic for a millennial and skeptical generation ... It is this
care for clearly ringing music, more hymnal than conversational, and
the patterns of complex and intricately resonent motifs, of snow, of
ash, of the moon burning or falling like a bomb, of bare skulls and the
light shafting through their excavation, which make the best argument
that National Anthem is much
more than an otherwise sly wink from a generation looking for
America.
—Lynnell Edwards
from Indiana Review…
National Anthem is
a collection of love poems to both the infinite and the infinitesimal.
They are transformations at the most beautiful: an ever-expanding
universe squeezed into a teacup, an entire cosmology fit into a
mechanical bird's heart. —Ryan Teitman
from St. Ann's Review…
No
empire lasts forever, and Prufer has achieved an elegy of sorts to his
country at a moment when it needs to soberly assess the wreckage.
For all the challenges that decline may pose, National
Anthem reminds
us how after a multitude of disasters, the past may yet sustain us for
another moment, as we pause to take in its quiet and steady erosions,
“so beautiful,/ I know you'd agree,/ and
terrible.” —Gabriel
Rocha
from Post No Ills…
There
are poets writing who know a poem is also place, a crowded room where
one can be whomever he or she desires, who understand that to be able
to write a poem is a form of freedom. The publication of National
Anthem shows
Kevin Prufer to be this kind of writer. In this collection, the voices
are myriad and unexpected: gunfire, a shopping mall, young girls in
heaven, history, and the American West all speak. And yet the
collection’s preoccupation is not with voices, but with the idea
of nationhood—how it crumbles and how people love while it
crumbles. —Reginald
Dwayne Betts
from The Athens Banner-Herald…
Prufer's
meditations on a post-apocalyptic America manage to be frightening,
amusing and, above all else, extremely insightful. —Janet
Geddis
from On the Seawall, A Literary Website
by Ron Slate…
This
is Prufer’s most sophisticated book to date in thought and in
scope, as other reviewers have amply noted. But what I love about National
Anthem is
not so much the big but the small -- how each arresting image layers on
top of others for a complete effect. In a poem called "The Mean Boys,"
Prufer ends with: "The snow has painted the town away, and I miss the
flash when they opened their mouths to laugh." Here, Prufer's images
don't only sound interesting, but also serve a greater purpose of
indicating a decaying and a fallen world. A distant town is described
as "a row of crumbled teeth." Ruin and decay are adeptly made artistic
by such original imagery throughout a book that travels skillfully and
widely between the macro and the personal. —Victoria
Chang
from The Laurel Review…
National Anthem
is an accomplished book that is deceptive in both its brevity and its
quietude. Behind its seeming uncertainty are poems that scream across a
continent and through thousands of years of imperial failure and
ineptitude…its cries are haunting long after the book is closed.
—Michael McLane
Still More
reviews....
Prufer
grapples with American power and its deceptions with subtlety and
sadness. —Editors Select, The Notre
Dame Review
"There
is nothing so lonely as an empire detached from its people," writes
Prufer in his poem "What We Did with the Empire." If anything, that
line could well serve as the thesis statement for this collection of
more than 40 poems by the English professor at the University of
Central Missouri and editor of Pleiades:
A Journal of New Writing. In two sections, the slim book
collects poems that consider the failings and foibles of politics and
government, urban life and consumerism -- belated wakeup calls for
citizens of a police state that's constantly at war with other nations
(and itself). The tenor and tone is largely one of careful but
unavoidable and perhaps understandable neutrality and distance --
reminding me slightly of the prose of Ben Marcus and the comic books of
Peter Milligan -- and Prufer's imagery is strong but subtle: birds and
boats, coins and coffins, snow and soot. This is a poetry of decay and
decline, and there's little hope in the book outside of the occasional
lines like, "and the office towers bending down to us as if they'd cup
us in their hands and warm us, / as if they'd lift us from the streets
before we froze." ("We Wanted to Find America") Too little, too late,
for now, and for that, I am thankful.
—Small Press Review
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.
____
Praise
for earlier books....

Fallen From a Chariot
(2005)
Carnegie Mellon University Press

The Finger Bone (2002)
Reissued in 2013 in the
Carnegie Mellon Classic Contemporary Series!
Carnegie Mellon University Press

Strange Wood (1998)
Winthrop/LSU Press
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