Cities at Dawn

(Hardback)

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"Whatever's smuggled into these poemsthe Petronas Towers, Afghanistan cliffs, Lugers and New Jerseyobeys the abstract logic at the heart of descriptive writing: the sweet ease of writing's intangibility, its virtual tease." Adam Fitzgerald, The American Reader

Lush, surreal, cinematic, and imagistically precise, Geoffrey Nutter paints the world into his fifth collection of poems. His poems display a consciousness in awe of all matter, be it organic, mechanical, industrial, ornithological, or sartorial. Iridescent and sparkling, his poems are ornate wonders of language, each their own contained ecosystem and civilization.

From "A Small Victorian Object":

What's that in the mud where the tide is going out
Buttons; bottle caps; small bits of Styrofoam
that look like shells or coral; a few dead crabs;
a cracked porcelain vessel from the Victorian era
for containing the tears shed by those
who have survived the death of loved ones.

Geoffrey Nutter is the author of A Summer Evening (winner of the 2001 Colorado Prize), Water's Leaves & Other Poems (Winner of the 2004 Verse Press Prize), Christopher Sunset (winner of the 2011 Sheila Motton Book Award), and The Rose of January. He has taught poetry at Princeton, Columbia, the University of Iowa, NYU, and the New School, and currently teaches Greek and Latin Classics and Cultural Studies at Queens College. He runs the Wallson Glass Poetry Seminars in New York City.

Reviews

"Whatever's smuggled into these poems--the Petronas Towers, Afghanistan cliffs, Lugers and New Jersey--obeys the abstract logic at the heart of descriptive writing: the sweet ease of writing's intangibility, its virtual tease." --Adam Fitzgerald, The American Reader "Poems about strawberries, battleships, and elevators begin on track and morph into burgeoning blossoms. The poems unfurl smoothly and astonishingly, 'winding toward a pinnacle.'" --Jeffrey Cyphers Wright, The Brooklyn Rail "Nutter is a poet whose hand rests on the rudder, but who is also confident enough to let his poem-ships follow the current underneath. It's a movement similar to the way dreams progress...where the propulsive force of associative imagery leads each poem forward down the page." --Michelle Taransky, Time Out Chicago "Thank goodness for Geoffrey Nutter, whose poetry seems to be powered equally by sunlight, virtue, wonder, and humility...Geoffrey Nutter has handed us a book that records the motions of being human, enacting it in language that leads to a passionate feeling of overflow." --Rain Taxi "Like Italo Calvino meets Wallace Stevens meets William Gass with a dash of Kafka tossed in, Nutter's writing has one foot planted firmly in reality and the other in the fantastical world of the poet's imagination." --Michelle Aldredge, Gwarlingo

Author Bio

Geoffrey Nutter is the author of A Summer Evening (winner of the 2001 Colorado Prize), Water's Leaves & Other Poems (Winner of the 2004 Verse Press Prize), Christopher Sunset (winner of the 2011 Sheila Motton Book Award), and The Rose of January. He has taught poetry at Princeton, Columbia, University of Iowa, NYU, and the New School, and currently teaches Greek and Latin Classics and Cultural Studies at Queens College. He runs the Wallson Glass Poetry Seminars in New York City.