Page 15 - The University of Wisconsin Press Spring 2013
Basic HTML Version
POETRY
Winner of the 2013 Brittingham Prize in Poetry, selected by Terrance Hayes
Greg Wrenn’s debut collection opens with a long poem in which a man undergoes
surgery to become a centaur. Other poems speak in voices as varied as those of
Robert Mapplethorpe, Hercules, and a Wise Man at the birth of Jesus.
Centaur
skitters along the blurred lines between compulsivity and following one’s heart,
stasis and self-realization, human and animal. Here, suffering and transcendence
are restlessly conjoined.
“
Centaur
testifies to the grave fact that humans can harm each other until they
want to trade in their bodies: ‘I want to feel alive,’ says the man seeking to become
a centaur as the book begins. This is a masterful poetic debut marked by lyric bril-
liance and difficult, yet gleaming, wisdom.”—Katie Ford, author of
Colosseum
“The terrific, turbulent poems in Greg Wrenn’s
Centaur
seem as much etched as
written—acid-exact, black promises on white possibilities, lines and space cross-
hatched with thrilling precision. These poems will startle you at first, and then
haunt you long after.”—J. D. McClatchy, editor of
The Yale Review
and author
of
Hazmat
“These powerful poems mark the aliveness, suffering, and sensuality of the body.
They map out erotic adventures and the loneliness of human need. They flout dan-
ger with superb lyric craft. But they don’t stop there. Each poem offers a paradigm
of yearning held together by a rare excellence of language and music. This is a
marvelous debut collection.”—Eavan Boland, author of
A Journey with Two Maps
Greg Wrenn
, a native of northeast Florida, is
a former Wallace Stegner Fellow and a recipi-
ent of the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry
Society of America. His work has appeared
in
New England Review
,
The American Poetry
Review
,
The Yale Review
, and elsewhere. He is
a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University.
PAPERBACK ORIGINAL
MARCH
LC: 2012032696 PS
80 PP. 6 X 9
E-BOOK $12.95 ISBN 978-0-299-29443-4
The Brittingham Prize in Poetry
Ronald Wallace, Series Editor
• Visit
“The magic here, like the best magic,
transforms with each encounter.
Fluid, tempered, atmospheric:
Cen-
taur
is a beautiful, encompassing
debut.”
Terrance Hayes, Brittingham
Prize judge and National Book Award
winner
UWPRESS
.
WISC
.
EDU
15
O f r e l a t e d i n t e r e s t
“Jazzy Danziger is the girl next door of
American letters, giving voice to the ordi-
nary with an astonishing grace, language
at once elegant and fierce, deft and daz-
zling. . . .
Darkroom
is a luminous, stun-
ning debut.”—Alice Anderson, author of
Human Nature
Winner of the 2012 Brittingham Prize
in Poetry, selected by Jean Valentine
PUBLISHED MARCH 2012
LC: 2011041963 64 PP. 6 × 9
E-BOOK $9.99 ISBN 978-0-299-28683-5
Pak Han
