Description
A powerful, indelible new collection by Michael Palmer—“one of America’s most important poets” (The Harvard Review)
Michael Palmer’s new book—a collection in two parts, “The Laughter of the Sphinx” and “Still (a cantata—or nada—for Sister Satan)”—contains 52 poems.
The title poem begins “The laughter of the Sphinx / caused my eyes to bleed” and haunts us with the ruin we are making of our world, even as Palmer revels in its incredible beauty. Such central tensions in The Laughter of the Sphinx—between beauty and loss, love and death, motion and rest, knowledge and ignorance—glow in Palmer’s lyrical play of light and entirely hypnotize the reader. The stakes, as always with Palmer, are very high, essentially life and death: “Please favor us with a reply / regarding our one-time offer / which will soon expire.”
Reviews
"Palmer manages to cut deep into the unknowable appeal of the best poetry, some of which Palmer can claim to have written." — Jonathon Sturgeon, Flavorwire
"Depending on the poem, the laughter here is by turns bitter, wistful even playful, but typically inflected by a sense of enigma. Returning again and again to songs and singing, to voices and voicelessness, Palmer continues to push the boundaries of poetry with dream songs that explore the place of poetry in a surreal world 'where headless horseman sing/fevered songs/of self and war.' Palmer writes with uncanny precision about this world, a world that this book finds to be as beautiful as it is violated, and his poetry often achieves an ecstatic pitch, but one in which pain is rarely absent." — Jon Thompson, Free Verse
"Palmer’s poems can suggest multiverses, silent but spectrally there." — James Gibbons, Hyperallergic
"The music in these verses never exhausts itself […] Palmer recomposes the measures of poetic song for our time." — Benjamin Hollander, New York Times Book Review
"Magnificent … an astringent blend of surrealism and symbolism." — The New York Times Book Review
"Exemplarily radical." — John Ashbery
"The most influential avant-gardist working, and perhaps the greatest poet of his generation. His genius is for making the world strange again." — Village Voice
"Palmer is among America’s most elegant—and abstract—heirs to modernist poetry." — The Believer
Also By: Michael Palmer 
Little Elegies for Sister Satan
Paperback, 2021
Shaped by the poet’s long view of history, these beautiful lamenting poems take sudden bracing plunges into close-up views of our apocalypse
Little Elegies for Sister Satan
E Book, 2021
Shaped by the poet’s long view of history, these beautiful lamenting poems take sudden bracing plunges into close-up views of our apocalypse
