Synopses & Reviews
kids everywhere are called to supper: it's late
it's dark and you're all played out. you want to go home
no rule is left to this game. playmates scatter like
breaking glass
they return to smear the ______. and you're it
--from "[you'd want to go to the reunion: see]"
In Cocktails, D. A. Powell closes his contemporary Divine Comedy with poems of sharp wit and graceful eloquence born of the AIDS pandemic. These poems, both harrowing and beautiful, strive toward redemption and light within the transformative and often conflicting worlds of the cocktail lounge, the cinema, and the Gospels.
Review
"Powell recognizes in the contemporary the latest manifestations of a much older tradition: namely, what it is to be human... I admire these poems immensely, for their deftness with craft, their originality of vision, their ability to fuse old and new without devolving to gimmick and for a dignity as jazzily inventive as it is sheer." Carl Phillips, from the citation for the 2001 Boston Review Poetry Contest
Review
"Powell's poems sing with exuberant highs and sobering lows all in the shadow of AIDS." Minneapolis Star Tribune
Review
"In Cocktails, D. A. Powell's lens for examining reality and society is fitted with a very modern filter-passionate wit." Carol Frost
Review
"Powell's third, and best, book completes his much-talked-about trilogy about growing up gay and uneasy in the age of HIV and about living with the virus himself....As in Tea, Powell (who now teaches at Harvard) uses the ultra-long line he deployed for agile grammatical feints and leaps; these poems, however, show a greater range, and far more versatile use of old-school precedents (from the Gospels to Renaissance pastoral), skillfully mixed with pop culture of all kinds. " Publishers Weekly
Synopsis
kids everywhere are called to supper: it's late
it's dark and you're all played out. you want to go home
no rule is left to this game. playmates scatter like
breaking glass
they return to smear the ______. and you're it
from "you'd want to go to the reunion: see"
In Cocktails, D. A. Powell closes his contemporary Divine Comedy with poems of sharp wit and graceful eloquence born of the AIDS pandemic. These poems, both harrowing and beautiful, strive toward redemption and light within the transformative and often conflicting worlds of the cocktail lounge, the cinema, and the Gospels.
About the Author
D. A. Powell is the author of
Tea and Lunch. He is Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Poetry at Harvard University.