Description
Shaped by the poet’s long view of history, these beautiful lamenting poems take sudden bracing plunges into close-up views of our apocalypse
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?
Reviews
"Magnificent: an astringent blend of surrealism and symbolism." — New York Times Book Review
"The most influential avant-gardist working, and perhaps the greatest poet of his generation. His genius is for making the world strange again. He sets a radical drama between the philosophical and the personal, between sense and the sensual—a tension unfolding endlessly outward from history, from the arcade of ghosts, to powerfully unsettle the living." — Joshua Clover, Village Voice
"Palmer’s fresh images and experimental language will haunt readers’ minds long after they’ve stopped reading." — American Poet
"Palmer is among America's most elegant—and abstract—heirs to modernist poetry." — The Believer
"A new book of poetry by Michael Palmer is always an important event. One of our greatest living poets — he has spent a lifetime producing a challenging, radically defamiliarizing body of work of uncanny beauty and grandeur. Little Elegies for Sister Satan is a remarkable achievement." — Norman Finkelstein, Restless Messengers
"These are poems about confronting the end, the end of one’s own time and time in general, about repetition and the paradox of poetry, its ability to say the unsayable, to exist and yet remain unsaid, the utility of futility." — Elisa Gabbert, The New York Times
"These are profoundly beautiful and moving poems full of despair, sorrow, and humor about what can and cannot be said as we fall further into the brink." — John Yau, Hyperallergic