Dan Chiasson has been hailed in America as 'one of the most gifted young poets of his generation' (Frank Bidart). This book - his first to be published in Britain - brings together poems from his first two US collections, "The Afterlife of Objects" (2002) and "Natural History" (2005), along with more recent work. His later collection, "Where's the Moon, There's the Moon", was published by Bloodaxe in 2010. "The Afterlife of Objects" is a kind of dreamed autobiography in which the enigmas of an individual mind become universal puzzles. "Natural History" takes its inspiration from Pliny's encyclopaedic "Historia Naturalis", suggesting that a person is like a world, full of mysteries and wonders - and equally in need of a compendium of everything known.

About the Author
Dan Chiasson was born in Burlington, Vermont, and educated at Amherst College and Harvard University, where he completed a PhD in English. A widely published literary critic, Chiasson is a regular reviewer for The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review, poetry editor of the Paris Review, and has published a critical study, One Kind of Everything: Poem and Person in Contemporary America, with the University of Chicago Press in 2007. His Bloodaxe selection Natural History and other poems (2006) drew on two collections published in the US, The Afterlife of Objects (University of Chicago Press, 2002) and Natural History (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005). This was followed by Where's the Moon, There's the Moon (Alfred A. Knopf, US / Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2010), Bicentennial (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014) and The Math Campers (Alfred A. Knopf, 2020). He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship for poetry, a Pushcart Prize and a Whiting Writers' Award, and teaches at Wellesley College. He lives in Sudbury, Massachusetts.

Reviews
Dan Chiasson has succeeded in writing the poetry many of his generation aim for: free-swinging, gorgeous in phrase, bold in imagination, athletic in movement...the imagination is an organ of perception, a means of feeling. -- Robert Pinsky
Dan Chiasson is a wilfully literary poet - one who invokes (and impersonates) writers both classic and modern, meditates on the function of poetry, plays self-consciously with voice and toys shamelessly with time. Yet he can also lay down a clean, unadorned lyric line...There is something serious behind the literary shenanigans - an ambition to write larger than any one self stirs the book to life. -- Kay Ryan * New York Times Book Review *
Like Emerson's "transparent eyeball" or that of Pliny, Dan Chiasson's gaze is curious, friendly, and unassumingly all-encompassing. Like William James (another mentor), his distinctions are smooth and profound and capable of sudden crescendos of meaning that are heartbreaking in their intensity. -- John Ashbery



Book Information
ISBN 9781852247362
Author Dan Chiasson
Format Paperback
Page Count 112
Imprint Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Publisher Bloodaxe Books Ltd