Guzzle

The poems in GUZZLE are the Americanized cousins of the classic Arabic ghazal. Loose, shaggy beasts, their three-lined stanzas leap from celebration to skepticism to wild laughter. The poems reflect on the nature of language, environmental collapse, the presence of God, erotic desire, genius and madness, fatherhood, fame, and the pleasures of poetry, and they evoke artists and thinkers ranging from Whitman to Wittgenstein, Olivier Messiaen to Sally Mann. Forever stretching the ghazal form to compass the borders of postmodern reality, GUZZLE is a meditation on the ways that "we ourselves are holy timber, waiting to be joined, / Tongue and groove, to raise up the house of the beautiful."