What Next, Old Knife?: Poems

Axelrod, David

ISBN 10: 098399756X / ISBN 13: 9780983997566

Published by Lost Horse Press, 2012

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: What Next, Old Knife?: Poems
• Publisher: Lost Horse Press
• Publication Date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 098399756X
• ISBN 13: 9780983997566
• Binding: paperback
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

Ranging across a diverse contemporary society of night-school courses and displaced "adult learners," from concrete apartment blocks full of exiles and poor economic migrants to the Iraq War, Germany of the 1930s, Vilna of the 1920s, and medieval Girona, What Next, Old Knife? is a sobering encounter with class, culture, and history--personal and otherwise. Throughout this new collection of poems, David Axelrod struggles with how we learn and unlearn our humanity, imagining the ways in which individuals and whole societies live with and recover from moral catastrophe.

The collection ends with a long choral poem, a visionary dialogue between the living and the dead who insist that language can resist nihilism, reclaim hope, and enact future accord.

About the Author

David Axelrod has published five collections of poems, The Jerusalem of Grass (Ahsahta), two limited-editions of long poems, The Kingdom at Hand and The Chronicles of the Withering State (Ice River), Departing by a Broken Gate (Wordcraft of Oregon), and The Cartographer's Melancholy (Eastern Washington University Press), which won the Spokane Prize and was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. He also has published a collection of cultural and environmental essays about the rural Northwest, Troubled Intimacies (Oregon State University Press). Along with his wife, Jodi Varon, he edits basalt: a journal of fine & literary arts. He has lived in La Grande, Oregon since 1988, where he teaches literature and creative writing at Eastern Oregon University.