Aaron Anstett – författare

These poems turns laconic and garrulous, hard-boiled and tender, magnify gaps and unreliabilities in the surface of things through which the depths of an underlying desolation, a nameless existential care, and the mystery of love may be glimpsed; they make a swaying bridge over the abyss of loss. "Number among my umpteen flaws detached glibness", he writes; "Who would disagree that little's glitchless?" What he calls his glibness, transmitted with a compressed but graceful musicality, often attains an unsentimental lyricism all the more touching for its reticence. His audacious imagination and relentless intelligence give rise to a richly ironic humor that is often valedictory, somber, even grim, but never without profound affection and attention.

The sapient roaches of our planetary future, when they seek to understand the sickening dismay, abysmal grief and goofy absurdity of the Anthropocene in Donald Trumps America, will reach for their dog-eared (or bug-horned) copies of Aaron Anstetts Please State the Nature of Your Emergency. In these impossibly crystalline poems, Anstett has distilled from the ironic bile of our vast, unbearable tragedy the steely essence of our predicament.

This is a snapshot of Aaron Anstett's career so far: the author's own selections from six previous collections, from SUSTENANCE (1997) to PLEASE STATE THE NATURE OF YOUR EMERGENCY (2017), plus twenty-seven new poems. From the beginning, Anstett's work has been driven by a restless attention and lyrical ear. He is a poet of surprise and wit and wonder.