Editors' Choice: Best Books of the Last 25 Years, The Bloomsbury Review.
Pushcart Prize, 2004.
George Bogin Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, 2002.
Emily Dickinson Award of the PSA, 2003.
Finalist, Balcones Prize, 2006.
William Rockhill Nelson Award, 2006
Like the image of butterflies in Satyajit Ray's Distant Thunder,
such grief in such abundance; such beauty in destruction. An elgiac
poet of the highest order, Kevin Prufer draws the parallel between our
own failures and the collapse of entire empires in graceful, eloquent
lines. Here, too, the empire fails, falls: "my empire, like a blood
drop into the grass." If any record of humanity survives our present
disastrous course, let these memorable poems by among those
artifacts. —D. A. Powell
A
richly conceived collection of poems that offers a completely
astonishing display of language, narrative, and stanzaic and metrical
variety — all brought to bear on the state of having fallen
from a high place as it applies to the empires of machines, self, and
memory; of ancient and contemporary Rome; and of ourselves. Acute and
witty, heart-breaking and full of depth, Fallen from a Chariot places Prufer among a high order of poets indeed. —Bloomsbury Review
Prufer has taken the elegy and made it new. —The Notre Dame Review
Fallen from a Chariot is overflowing with such excellent ideas. —Mid-American Review
Invigorating talent. —The Georgia Review
Prufer
is able to ingeniously combine creative and diverse images, settings,
and ideas into a work that speaks in a new way to the very old and very
human fear of and fascination with failure and deat. —Verse on-line
Prufer's ability to negotiate darker truths without cynicism or despair is considerable and refreshing. Fallen from a Chariot
features an unmistakable lyrical voice that offers a compelling new
vision of history, myth, and contemporary spiritual anguish and
redemption. —Prairie Schooner
Out of their elegant surfaces, these poems illuminate the nature of precarious times. —Speakeasy
Prufer
leaves readers with a troubling look into a moment when what will be
important about us, and our civilization, is their absence. —Free Verse
The
Sack of Rome might be taking place in Lower Manhattan, and Kevin Prufer
applies the fall of that empire to the reader’s world. His
subject is wreckage, whether of automobiles or urban life. When past
and present conflate, the resonance is painful. Is it possible any
longer to use the image of a burning city in a poem without calling up
September 11? Exactness, rightness of image, phrase, word, and line
inform the lyric voice at the heart of poems such as “Claudius
Adrift,” where a protean contemporary speaker, shifting into the
emperor’s voice, says, “And one by one, the windows /
grinned into flame. The library swayed on its pillars, groaned / as the
roof fell through into glitter and cloud. / / I have always loved the
grand moment, / the great, abstracted / dying off, when the city
collapses and trees blaze.” The book’s themes accrue,
concluding with a stunning and image that unmistakably refers to the
present: “People kept leaping out of windows. / / The air was
full of businessmen, / their red ties streaming behind their
necks.” —Virginia Quarterly Review
...One of the most forceful, original, and strikingly urgent voices in contemporary American poetry. —Chautauqua Literary Journal
Kevin Prufer is one of our finest young poets. —Bloomsbury Review
Perhaps "some things are too sad to be made beautiful," but Fallen from a Chariot comes achingly close. —Ohioana Quarterly
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