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The Deathbed Playboy
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| Phillip Dacey |
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| Minnesota Book Award Finalist |
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Poetry
96 Pages
ISBN: 0-910055-47-5
Paper: $14.00
ISBN: 0-910055-48-3
Cloth: $24.00 |
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Once described by Dave Smith as "a one-man symphony," Dacey ranges widely in tones, strategies, and forms, a diversity appropriate for one who characteristically meditates on American identity. These poems wind together many strands—our national pop culture, the vagaries of human discourse, death, and sexuality—and frame them in a narrative as comic as it is plangent. Surprises in the book include cameo appearances by George Bush and Florence Nightingale, as well as a take on J.S. Bach that owes something to the Keystone Cops. This book displays the command a poet's sixth book ought to.
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| Philip Dacey's five previous books of poetry include The Boy Under the Bed (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981) and The Man With Red Suspenders (Milkweed, 1986). He co-edited Strong Measures: Contemporary American Poetry in Traditional Forms (Harper Collins, 1986). The latest of his many chapbooks is What's Empty Weighs the Most: 24 Sonnets (Black Dirt Press, 1997). Widely published in periodicals and anthologies, he teaches at the Minnesota State University in Marshall. Awards include two NEA fellowships, two Pushcart Prizes, Bush and Loft-McKnight fellowships, and a Fulbright Lectureship in Yugoslavia, as well as prizes from Poetry Northwest, Yankee, Prairie Schooner, Flyway, and The Nebraska Review. |
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| Praise for The Deathbed Playboy |
"Dacey plays, as Frost would have it, for mortal stakes. I love his unsolemn seriousness and his rangy wit."
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—Stephen Dunn .......... |
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| "A poetic version of Raymond Carver, Dacey sees in painful difficulties the wonder of compensation. His poems are letters addressed to God about the problematic nature of salvation." |
—Frank Allen, American Book Review .......... |
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