Lovers of Today

(Hardback)

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Description

In Lovers of Today, Garrett Caples is his most playful and heartfelt. Here are poems that generously place the reader in a particular poetic moment that is both elegiac and also wildly entertaining. Taken from a bar of the same name in New York City, Lovers of Today is a collection of poetry that pays tribute to friendships including Kevin Killian, John Ashbery, Joanne Kyger, and Bill Berkson, among others, wherein each poem is a celebration of lifes ephemerality.

Reviews

Caples (Complications) fills his newest collection with musicality and pathos, anchoring his playful language with ardent longing. Just like great power ballads, these poems are maudlin yet still authentically moving...A love song to Oakland, to idols, and to love itself, Caples's raucous, tender, and tuneful collection lives up to its title.--Publishers Weekly

Caples supplies us with a full aesthetic meal, with alarming images right out of the French Surrealists. He also means what he says; regardless of any implications to the contrary, Caples is writing out of emotion, even well-done sentiment.
--Max Winter, Rain Taxi

With a supply of thumbnail biographies that read like the most improbable fiction, and a leisurely but learned style, Caples makes the minor seem major.
--Ed Park, The Poetry Foundation

Author Bio

Garrett Caples is the author of three previous poetry books, Power Ballads (Wave Books, 2016), Complications (2007), and The Garrett Caples Reader (1999), a collection of outtakes, The Rise & Fall of Johnny Volume (2020), and a bilingual selection, Noches Aptridas (Unstated Nights, 2019). Hes also written a book of essays, Retrievals (2014), and a pamphlet, Quintessence of the Minor (2010). Hes the editor of Philip Lamantias Preserving Fire: Selected Prose (2018), Samuel Greenbergs Poems from the Greenberg MSS (2019), and Michael McClures Mule Kick Blues and Last Poems (2021), as well as the co-editor of The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia (2013), Particulars of Place (2015) by Richard O. Moore, Incidents of Travel in Poetry: New and Selected Poems (2016) by Frank Lima, and Arcana: A Stephen Jonas Reader (2019). He is an editor at City Lights Books, where he curates the Spotlight Poetry Series. He has a PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and lives in San Francisco.