Celestial Joyride

Michael Waters' books of poetry include BOA Editions titles Gospel Night (2011), Darling Vulgarity (2006--finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize), and Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems (2001--finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize), as well as Bountiful (1992), The Burden Lifters (1989), and Anniversary of the Air (1985) from Carnegie Mellon University Press. He has co-edited several anthologies, including Contemporary American Poetry (Houghton Mifflin, 2006) and Perfect in Their Art: Poems on Boxing from Homer to Ali (Southern Illinois University Press, 2003). Shoestring Press in the UK published Selected Poems in 2011. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Poetry, American Poetry Review, Paris Review, Yale Review, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, and Rolling Stone. In 2004, he chaired the Poetry panel for the National Book Award. The recipient of five Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Foundation, the Ledig-Rowohlt Foundation, and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Waters teaches at Monmouth University and in the Drew University MFA Program in Poetry and Poetry in Translation.

PRAISE FOR MICHAEL WATERS "It is difficult to imagine poetry could be more finely crafted and compelling than the work of Michael Waters, who has been quietly writing some of the best poetry in the United States for the past three decades." --Stephan Delbos, Prague Post "In lines that are often metrically formal--the decasyllabic line appears in many of [his poems]--there is often a quite wild range of emotion, from the overtly sexual to the politically conscious, the plaintively domestic to the brashly cosmopolitan. This is highly energized verse." --Michael Broek, Poetry International "Waters seeks to capture the different kinds of negative space which interpenetrate American public life, history, and even the most intimate of moments 'between two bodies'--what he calls 'the loneliness of two people / together.'" --Jonathan Taylor, Times Literary Supplement "A significant American voice... testifies eloquently to the persistence of the lyric in a time and history that would seek to obliterate it." --John Mann, World Literature Today "Waters excels at stark-eyed, honest elegies... all rendered in the strong free verse that is [his] signature. He is a poet of detail, but also one of directness, pursuing strong feeling wherever it dives or climbs." --Publishers Weekly "Waters seeks and appropriates a rich, malleable language that allows him to express the subtleties of human emotion and the realities of the human condition... Michael Waters is perhaps the best poet of his generation." --Floyd Collins, Gettysburg Review "Michael Waters' autobiographical poetry looks back to memorable moments, which include his 6-year-old son: "Is that a log or a dog? he worries.//The poem doesn't know yet. Guess, it insists./ Meaning to animate the universe,/Dog, I wager (I always wager dog)/And on three wobbly legs the wet log lifts." He also writes luminously, as in "Eve's Daughter," cleaning windows: "Each chamois gesture returning to glass/A certain beauty always there, but less/Obvious before this moment, the light//After seven days' rain casting judgment//Upon all things with odd clarity: dust/Flared to meaning, your body enraptured/By the hour's whispered solicitations./Your flown soul unveiled will never be missed://The glass so clean it no longer exists." Waters stands among the best American poets writing today."-- My San Antonio

• CONTENTSMadrigal*EffataBeauty in the WorldPunk PrayerAmerican Songbook*DominoesPoem, Slow to Come, on the Death of LoganMarvelOld SchoolOld Country RecipesPottery SaleBlackbirdsTic Tac Toe*Sixties SonnetOld RecordsThe Captain’s TowerThe BeatlesThe Book of NamesEve’s DaughterMihaela BarefootRadu Lupu*The ScavengersThe LittoralHorse (Ars Poetica)Dog EarsQuoting RumiJade Garden*Morning RunErotic AmphoraThe New GodsLast Day on IosSick Student*Chernobyl NecklaceTigancaLetter to Stern from SuceavaSucevi?a MonasteryVorone? Blue*Lord CockroachWooden Boat*NotesAcknowledgmentsAbout the AuthorColophon