Description
In August Kleinzanler's most powerful and inventive collection to date, he succeeds in creating a new idiom for American lyric poetry that captures the velocity and swerves of contemporary life. He pushes the language very hard to get there, and the results are breathtaking: an angular, propulsive poetry that transforms character, voice, and setting into buzzing, luminous events. The landscape will be familiar from earlier collections -- San Francisco, New York and environs -- but here Kleinzahler also explores the fabric of dream-life with the same precision and liveliness of observation that he brings to his poems of the city. Kleinzanler's breadth of emotional register and his variety of subject matter are remarkable. The effects can be haunting, sometimes dazzling, but always memorable.
