Little Elegies for Sister Satan

Little Elegies for Sister Satan presents indelibly beautiful new poems by Michael Palmer, "the foremost experimental poet of his generation, and perhaps of the last several generations" (citation for The Academy of American Poets' Wallace Stevens Award). Grappling with our dark times and our inability to stop destroying the planet or to end our endless wars, Palmer offers a counterlight of wit (poetry was dead again / they said again), as well as the glow of wonder. In polyphonic passages, voices speak from a decentered place, yet are rooted in the whole history of culture that has gone before: "When I think of 'possible worlds, ' I think not of philosophy, but of elegy. And impossible worlds. Resistant worlds."

In the light of day
perhaps all of this
will make sense.
But have we come this far,
come this close to death,
just to make sense?


Author: Michael Palmer
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Published: 05/04/2021
Pages: 96
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.40lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.30d
ISBN: 9780811230896

About the Author
Palmer, Michael: - Michael Palmer was born into an Italian-American family in Manhattan in 1943 and has lived in San Francisco since 1969. He has taught at numerous universities in the United States, Europe and Asia, and has published translations from a variety of languages, in particular French, Brazilian Portuguese and Russian. He has been involved in joint projects with many visual artists and composers in the United States and elsewhere and has also served as an artistic collaborator with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company for close to fifty years. Palmer's honors include two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America, and he was awarded the 2006 Wallace Stevens Award. In 1999, he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.