Description
Poetry that explores wildness and composes a landscape of complex human emotions.
Drawing on a range of stylistic influences, the poetry of Sur takes on the essence of connection and the ways in which we continually develop meaning about others and to the natural world. With this collection, David Koehn paints a landscape where wilderness intertwines with human emotions and grows between ill-fitting interpersonal connections. Sur invites readers to step back and look critically at their world while remaining intimately intertwined with it. Throughout, imagery of nature-like a snake drinking from a stream, or a mountain god-blends with the emotional landscape of tumultuous relationships, exploring themes of wildness and an inevitable unraveling of secrets.
About the Author
David Koehn is the author of Compendium, Scatterplot, and Twine, which won the Mary Sarton Poetry Prize. Koehn's writing has appeared in chapbooks and literary magazines including The Rumpus, McSweeney's, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Rhino, Volt, Carolina Quarterly, Diagram, Greensboro Review, North American Review, Smartish Pace, Hotel Amerika, Gargoyle, Zyzzva, and Prairie Schooner.
Reviews
"Sur barely contains itself. Koehn packs this new collection with the thick sounds of hard syllables striking the earth, shaking it. I love the density of these poems, the depth of observation-so much here that rewards multiple readings. Koehn is inclusive yet precise in his noticing. He embraces incompletion and mystery, while also giving them room to breathe. These poems turn on their surprising intimacies. There are no consolation prizes to be had here, but sometimes there is consolation. And even, sometimes, love." -- Jim Daniels, author of "Digger's Blues"
"Animated by 'the invention of song, people in pain,' Koehn's Sur ventures us into meadows, deltas, all kinds of traffic and tax returns. Beloveds and creatures abound here. And wild grasses. A feast of peaty, alluvial soils. These irreverent poems interrogate the biggest ideas and the smallest. How do we love and injure? How do we 'shape the shore of the world from the boat'? How do we behold a spider web across a trail after a night of rain? Language meanders, dizzyingly, intelligently, and thinks. What complicity, what grief, what water? And when we put these mutinous poems down again, there they appear, in full relief: our harmful ways. Our gentle hands." -- Natalie Khankan, author of "Quiet Orient Riot"
"Sur seamlessly plays sound and form with and against the speaker's perception of the natural world. The poems rejoice in the landscape's negative space, positing, 'What do we call the empty space between winter's branches?' Koehn's mystical speaker is constantly questing to name and not name liminal spaces, asking, 'Can the morning hold only one idea,/ Does uncertainty feel only one way?' Throughout these agile poems that deftly embody lists, incantations, and lyrical fragments, each engages the act of seeing as a sense of revelation and shape-shifting until the speaker prophesizes, 'You have become a thing concealed. A part of the kaleidoscope.'" -- Maria Nazos, author of "PULSE"
Book Information
ISBN 9781632431585
Author David Koehn
Format Paperback
Page Count 72
Imprint Omnidawn Publishing
Publisher Omnidawn Publishing
Weight(grams) 454g
Drawing on a range of stylistic influences, the poetry of Sur takes on the essence of connection and the ways in which we continually develop meaning about others and to the natural world. With this collection, David Koehn paints a landscape where wilderness intertwines with human emotions and grows between ill-fitting interpersonal connections. Sur invites readers to step back and look critically at their world while remaining intimately intertwined with it. Throughout, imagery of nature-like a snake drinking from a stream, or a mountain god-blends with the emotional landscape of tumultuous relationships, exploring themes of wildness and an inevitable unraveling of secrets.
About the Author
David Koehn is the author of Compendium, Scatterplot, and Twine, which won the Mary Sarton Poetry Prize. Koehn's writing has appeared in chapbooks and literary magazines including The Rumpus, McSweeney's, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Rhino, Volt, Carolina Quarterly, Diagram, Greensboro Review, North American Review, Smartish Pace, Hotel Amerika, Gargoyle, Zyzzva, and Prairie Schooner.
Reviews
"Sur barely contains itself. Koehn packs this new collection with the thick sounds of hard syllables striking the earth, shaking it. I love the density of these poems, the depth of observation-so much here that rewards multiple readings. Koehn is inclusive yet precise in his noticing. He embraces incompletion and mystery, while also giving them room to breathe. These poems turn on their surprising intimacies. There are no consolation prizes to be had here, but sometimes there is consolation. And even, sometimes, love." -- Jim Daniels, author of "Digger's Blues"
"Animated by 'the invention of song, people in pain,' Koehn's Sur ventures us into meadows, deltas, all kinds of traffic and tax returns. Beloveds and creatures abound here. And wild grasses. A feast of peaty, alluvial soils. These irreverent poems interrogate the biggest ideas and the smallest. How do we love and injure? How do we 'shape the shore of the world from the boat'? How do we behold a spider web across a trail after a night of rain? Language meanders, dizzyingly, intelligently, and thinks. What complicity, what grief, what water? And when we put these mutinous poems down again, there they appear, in full relief: our harmful ways. Our gentle hands." -- Natalie Khankan, author of "Quiet Orient Riot"
"Sur seamlessly plays sound and form with and against the speaker's perception of the natural world. The poems rejoice in the landscape's negative space, positing, 'What do we call the empty space between winter's branches?' Koehn's mystical speaker is constantly questing to name and not name liminal spaces, asking, 'Can the morning hold only one idea,/ Does uncertainty feel only one way?' Throughout these agile poems that deftly embody lists, incantations, and lyrical fragments, each engages the act of seeing as a sense of revelation and shape-shifting until the speaker prophesizes, 'You have become a thing concealed. A part of the kaleidoscope.'" -- Maria Nazos, author of "PULSE"
Book Information
ISBN 9781632431585
Author David Koehn
Format Paperback
Page Count 72
Imprint Omnidawn Publishing
Publisher Omnidawn Publishing
Weight(grams) 454g
