Kevin Prufer – författare

An innovative roadmap to facing our past and present selvesHonest, aching, and intimate, self-elegies are unique poems focusing on loss rather than death, mourning versions of the self that are forgotten or that never existed. Within their lyrical frame, multiple selves can coexist—wise and naïve, angry and resigned—along with multiple timelines, each possible path stemming from one small choice that both creates new selves and negates potential selves. Giving voice to pain while complicating personal truths, self-elegies are an ideal poetic form for our time, compelling us to question our close-minded certainties, heal divides, and rethink our relation to others.  In Writing the Self-Elegy, poet Kara Dorris introduces us to this prismatic tradition and its potential to forge new worlds. The self-elegies she includes in this anthology mix autobiography and poetics, blending craft with race, gender, sexuality, ability and disability, and place—all of the private and public elements that build individual and social identity. These poems reflect our complicated present while connecting us to our past, acting as lenses for understanding, and defining the self while facilitating reinvention. The twenty-eight poets included in this volume each practice self-elegy differently, realizing the full range of the form. In addition to a short essay that encapsulates the core value of the genre and its structural power, each poet’s contribution concludes with writing prompts that will be an inspiration inside the classroom and out. This is an anthology readers will keep close and share, exemplifying a style of writing that is as playful as it is interrogative and that restores the self in its confrontation with grief.

Fantastic poets you've never heard of introduced by authors you know and love._x000D_/>_x000D_/>Other Legacies: Great Unsung American Poets brings together thirty-five extraordinary but under-recognized poets whose work has shaped and enriched the literary landscape of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, writers whose contributions were overlooked because of race, gender, sexuality, disability, region, language, resistance to prevailing literary norms, or plain bad luck. Selected and introduced by a vibrant community of contemporary poets and critics, these writers appear chronologically, allowing readers to trace an alternate, deeply pluralistic history of American poetry. With links to an interactive digital timeline, this anthology is an invaluable resource for classrooms, scholars, and readers seeking a more inclusive sense of American poetic lineage.

Fantastic poets you've never heard of introduced by authors you know and love._x000D_/>_x000D_/>Other Legacies: Great Unsung American Poets brings together thirty-five extraordinary but under-recognized poets whose work has shaped and enriched the literary landscape of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, writers whose contributions were overlooked because of race, gender, sexuality, disability, region, language, resistance to prevailing literary norms, or plain bad luck. Selected and introduced by a vibrant community of contemporary poets and critics, these writers appear chronologically, allowing readers to trace an alternate, deeply pluralistic history of American poetry. With links to an interactive digital timeline, this anthology is an invaluable resource for classrooms, scholars, and readers seeking a more inclusive sense of American poetic lineage.

An unflinching study of death, Kevin Prufer’s The Fears invites us to consider what it means to matter.

Editor, publisher, and poet Kevin Prufer presents his ninth poetry collection, The Fears, an intimate meditation on storytelling and mortality. "Ghostlit by streetlights” and filtered through tale and recollection, Prufer examines our fears of loss, death, and obscurity. Narratives are braided together as Prufer manipulates white space to mimic the silence of minds at work on unsolvable problems, how time “unravels / endlessly.” Here, visions of classical Greece and the trials of ancient Romans coexist with the everyday—memories of a parent’s death or the loss of a pet. We bear witness as the poet writes to preserve the intricacy of his own mind against the “certainty of absence.” Exploring what it means to be forgotten and how legacy is preserved through poetry, history books, a mummy’s index finger, and love letters from the grave, The Fears invites us to consider what it means to matter.

A haunting debut novel from celebrated poet Kevin Prufer.It’s 1984, and the invisible mists are falling, mists that cause people to slip into dreamless slumber—sleeps from which most, but not all, awaken. Those who do wake live in fear of the next mist, and the next, each a little longer and more dangerous than the last.Alternating between the perspectives of a kleptomaniac waitress named Cora and her twelve-year-old friend Glass, Sleepaway depicts a small-town America turned alarming. This is a place where loved ones are lost to a state between life and death; where denial, delusion, and desperation take hold of those remaining; where dealers of the antisleep drug Eight Track disappear into shadows, and a murderous wannabe kingpin hunts for victims.As civilization is shaved away one sleep storm at a time, people struggle to go on, making and losing allies and discovering new strengths and weaknesses. Cora sets out on an ill-fated road trip hoping to reclaim her sister’s love, only to discover a more powerful bond than blood. Glass, having lost his only parent to one of the first mists, searches for a stability he has never had and may never achieve. All the while, buildings rise outside town to cope with the mounting number of sleepers. Some see them as hospitals, others as repositories, and yet soon the air around them fills with ash.An allegory for post-pandemic America, Sleepaway grapples with questions concerning friendship, race, and family amid the horror of inexplicable, arbitrary annihilation.