David Daniel is the author of Seven-Star Bird, which won the Levis Reading Prize. Poetry editor of Ploughshares for more than a decade, he founded and produces WAMFEST: The Words and Music Festival, which has brought together many of the most celebrated artists for unique collaborative performances: Bruce Springsteen with Robert Pinsky, Rosanne Cash with C. D. Wright, Talib Kweli with Quincy Troupe, and dozens of others. He’s been a member of the core faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars and teaches at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Daniel lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

So you didn't think Rimbaud's Illuminations were possible in an American idiom? You didn't think that the explosive and tender, the vulgar and the visionary, could take concepts of spirit and body and wring their necks? These poems take on the South and the intricacies of race, they meditate on how power empties out the private life, all the while refusing to be pigeon-holed by ideologies of any stripe. They say with Whitman, 'Do I contradict myself? Well then, I contradict myself. . . .' Fierce and funny, ecstatic in their melancholy, these poems blow past any curb on the imagination. No one in any generation is writing poems that are like these: smart, visceral, immensely pleasurable to read.

David Daniel is the author of Seven-Star Bird, which won the Levis Reading Prize. Poetry editor of Ploughshares for more than a decade, he founded and produces WAMFEST: The Words and Music Festival, which has brought together many of the most celebrated artists for unique collaborative performances: Bruce Springsteen with Robert Pinsky, Rosanne Cash with C. D. Wright, Talib Kweli with Quincy Troupe, and dozens of others. He’s been a member of the core faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars and teaches at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Daniel lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

So you didn't think Rimbaud's Illuminations were possible in an American idiom? You didn't think that the explosive and tender, the vulgar and the visionary, could take concepts of spirit and body and wring their necks? These poems take on the South and the intricacies of race, they meditate on how power empties out the private life, all the while refusing to be pigeon-holed by ideologies of any stripe. They say with Whitman, 'Do I contradict myself? Well then, I contradict myself. . . .' Fierce and funny, ecstatic in their melancholy, these poems blow past any curb on the imagination. No one in any generation is writing poems that are like these: smart, visceral, immensely pleasurable to read.

David Daniel is the author of Seven-Star Bird, which won the Levis Reading Prize. Poetry editor of Ploughshares for more than a decade, he founded and produces WAMFEST: The Words and Music Festival, which has brought together many of the most celebrated artists for unique collaborative performances: Bruce Springsteen with Robert Pinsky, Rosanne Cash with C. D. Wright, Talib Kweli with Quincy Troupe, and dozens of others. He’s been a member of the core faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars and teaches at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Daniel lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

So you didn't think Rimbaud's Illuminations were possible in an American idiom? You didn't think that the explosive and tender, the vulgar and the visionary, could take concepts of spirit and body and wring their necks? These poems take on the South and the intricacies of race, they meditate on how power empties out the private life, all the while refusing to be pigeon-holed by ideologies of any stripe. They say with Whitman, 'Do I contradict myself? Well then, I contradict myself. . . .' Fierce and funny, ecstatic in their melancholy, these poems blow past any curb on the imagination. No one in any generation is writing poems that are like these: smart, visceral, immensely pleasurable to read.