Playlist for the Apocalypse: Poems - Hardcover

Rita Dove

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393867773 ISBN 13: 9780393867770

Publisher: WW Norton & Co, 2021

Synopsis

A piercing, unflinching new volume offers necessary music for our tumultuous present, from “perhaps the best public poet we have” (The Boston Globe).

In her first volume of new poems in twelve years, Rita Dove investigates the vacillating moral compass guiding the world’s experiments in democracy.

Whether depicting the first Jewish ghetto in sixteenth-century Venice or Black Lives Matter, this extraordinary poet never fails to connect history’s grand exploits to the triumphs and tragedies of individual lives ― the simmering resentment of a lift operator, an octogenarian’s exuberant mambo, the mordant humour of a philosophising cricket.

Audaciously playful yet grave, alternating poignant meditations on mortality and acerbic observations of injustice, Playlist for the Apocalypse takes us from the smallest moments of redemption to apocalyptic failures of the human soul.

About this title

About the Author

Rita Dove, Pulitzer Prize winner and former U S Poet Laureate, is the only poet honored with both the National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of Arts. A professor of creative writing at the University of Virginia, she lives in Charlottesville.

From the Back Cover

Praise for Rita Dove

"Through works that blend beauty, lyricism, critique, and politics, Ms. Dove has illuminated American poetry and literature." --Barack Obama, National Medal of Arts commendation

"Few contemporary poets are this capacious, this capable, this serious, and this pleasurable to read.... The lyric beauty of Dove's poems makes them unforgettable; their deep knowledge of history and its consequences makes them permanent." --Craig Morgan Teicher, Los Angeles Times

"There are so many casual pleasures in Ms. Dove's poetry that the precision and dexterity in her work--the darkness, too--can catch you unawares.... [Her] poems have earthiness, originality, power and range. Despair and loss are among her central themes, but so is the hunt for bedrock human pleasures." --Dwight Garner, New York Times

"One of the nation's most respected literary figures.... [A] writer who masterfully balances narrative and poetic finesse. Dove has often been praised, rightly so, for making all of this look easy." --Elizabeth Lund, Washington Post

"Dove's poems... all display a crystalline sound and composition. They read as if they were always meant to be." --Barbara Berman, The Rumpus

"Rita Dove has planed away unnecessary matter: pure shapes, her poems exhibit the thrift that Yeats called the sign of a perfected manner." --Helen Vendler, New York Review of Books

Edition details

• Publisher: WW Norton & Co
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393867773
• ISBN 13: 9780393867770
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 128