The Hotel Oneira: Poems

A thrilling new collection from one of the most original poets of his generation

"His work is a modernist swirl of sex, surrealism, urban life, and melancholy with a jazzy backbeat." While this praise appeared in the pages of The New York Times in 2005, it applies no less to August Kleinzahler's newest collection.
Kleinzahler's poetry is, as ever, concerned with permeability: voices, places, the real and the dreamed, the present and the past, all mingle together in verses that always ring true. Whether the poem is three lines long or spans several pages--whether the voice embodied is that of "an adult male of late middle age, // about to weep among the avocados and citrus fruits / in a vast, overlit room next to a bosomy Cuban grandma" as in "Whitney Houston," or that of the title character in "Hootie Bill Do Polonius," who is bidding "adios compadre // To a most galuptious scene Kid"--Kleinzahler finds the throbbing human heart at the core of experience.
This is a poet searching for--and finding--a cadence to suit life as it's lived today. Kleinzahler's verses are, as noted in the judges' citation for the 2004 Griffin Poetry Prize for his collection The Strange Hours Travelers Keep, "ferociously on the move, between locations, between forms, between registers." The Hotel Oneira finds Kleinzahler at his shape-shifting, acrobatic best, unearthing the "moments of grace" buried under the detritus of our hectic, modern lives.

Author: August Kleinzahler
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 10/21/2014
Pages: 112
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.35lbs
Size: 7.90h x 5.20w x 0.40d
ISBN: 9780374534813

About the Author
August Kleinzahler was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1949. He is the author of eleven books of poems and a memoir, Cutty, One Rock. His collection The Strange Hours Travelers Keep was awarded the 2004 Griffin Poetry Prize, and Sleeping It Off in Rapid City won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award. That same year he received a Lannan Literary Award. He lives in San Francisco, California.

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