Winner of the 2003 CW Books Poetry Prize: Fables from the Ark by Kurt Brown
Fables
from the Ark, Kurt Brown's third full-length collection of poems,
is the winner of the 2003 CW Books Poetry Prize. Written in spare,
understated lines, the book is a collection of darkly humorous retellings
of myth and mock narratives that immerse the reader in a deeper sense
of the fragility of human history and culture. Like the animals that board
the ark, we could be swept away at any minute--or not. On the edge of
that question, humanity lives out its life.
Sample Poems by Kurt Brown
Kurt Brown was born in Brooklyn, New York and grew up on Long Island and
in Connecticut where he attended the University of Connecticut. He spent
many years in Aspen, Colorado, where he founded the Aspen Writers' Conference
and edited a literary magazine, Aspen Anthology. His poems have appeared
in Southern Poetry Review, Massachusetts
Review, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, Crazyhorse, and many other
periodicals. He is the editor of Drive, They Said: Poems about Americans and Their
Cars, and Verse & Universe:
Poems about Science and Mathematics, as well as a collection of
essays about science and mathematics, The Measured Word. With his wife, poet Laure-Anne
Bosselaar, he edited Night Out: Poems
about Hotels, Motels, Restaurants and Bars. He is also the editor
of three collections of lectures given at writers' conferences across
America: The True Subject, Writing It
Down for James, and Facing the Lion. His two previous collections,
More Things in Heaven and Earth
(2002) and Return of the Prodigals
(1999) were published by Four Way Books. He lives with his wife
in New York City.
"What a wonderful book this is—one-third a unique homage to various
creatures, one-third persona poems in the voice of a woman named Rita
who does things (for good reasons)! like taking a shadow to the zoo, and
one-third a brilliant literary hoax/parody. What a dazzling ride!"—
Tom Lux
"Aesop, Pessoa, a little Voltaire, some Dr. Wuchsal, Kurt Brown's tri-axial
collection offers up a tri-cornered playground; you can enter the
ark of one and go be with the animals of Brown's mind; you can visit with
Rita (our dog is Rita, who knew she harbored such deepening kingdoms);
you can meet Tádjèck, if Tádjèck exists he's
the one Brown might allow as how who wrote the other two playgrounds.
We can't be sure. We? I wonder. Who's that? Some place in Fables
from the Ark there might be a hint."—Dara Wier
ISBN 1932339175, 88 pages, $16.00