The Sudden Architecture of the Dark, Poems by David Floyd
David
Floyd's The Sudden Architecture of the Dark confronts the dark
that exists in the world, and sings tough, haunting songs about persisting
through the dark:
I hate that love
is not enough, hate
the hard of it
all, hate
that we will somehow have to go on.
And that we will.
"Here is a big-hearted book addressed to contemporary America. When the poem 'Philadelphia Serenade' says: 'For now I am trying to sing your praises, / lay you down gentle' it's the word 'trying' that suggests the rich and doubled-edged splendor of The Sudden Architecture of the Dark. With praise tempered by scrutiny, tenderness tempered by toughness, David Floyd's mature debut collection shows us the beauty of love and the greater beauty of trying to love.”--Terrance Hayes
"David Floyd's poems evoke a powerful sense of place. Through his closely-observed landscapes and cityscapes, a solitary speaker often walks, apart from the lives around him, keenly observant, attempting 'to really see what is really / there.' These intelligent and haunting poems remind us of 'the pleasures of interiority,' of living as much in the mind as in the world, of relishing the language that helps us to register and convey 'beauty / in the domestic variety of urban ruin.'”--April Lindner
"When David Floyd writes in the middle of a poem about the American South that 'Nothing human is foreign,' his backhanded quotation from the Latin poet Terence (humani nihil a me alienum puto) is an offhanded summary of Floyd's whole poetic. Nothing is unwelcome in these precincts, where the unknown is simply the not yet disclosed. The charm of The Sudden Architecture of the Dark is its wild sprawl and intellectual generosity. 'I'd like to do a Rocky in reverse' he says of De Chirico's painting The Poet and His Muse, 'and take these guys to Pat's Steaks on Passyunk': just so. In a single line he identifies his purpose--finding the middle by bringing the extremes of art and the everyday into a fine, constant collision.”--J.T. Barbarese
David Floyd was born in Philadelphia, PA, in 1971, and has lived in Missouri, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York. Educated at the Culinary Institute of America, Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, and the University of Alabama, he is a former Charles G. Berwind Foundation scholar and a 2000 Bucknell Seminar For Younger Poets fellowship recipient. His poems and essays have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Cream City Review, New Delta Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Philadelphia Stories, Puerto del Sol, and Xconnect, as well as in other literary periodicals and anthologies. He is a visiting assistant professor of English at Saint Joseph's University. The Sudden Architecture of the Dark, a finalist for the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, is his first collection of poems.
ISBN 1933456469, 84 pages, $17.00