Long Division

by Alan Michael Parker

Overview

Poetry. In his seventh poetry collection, Alan Michael Parker aims to surprise. Recombining lists, fables, and mathematical equations, LONG DIVISION is formally playful, wielding irony as a lever of political resistance. Here is a writer fascinated by comedy, by sadness, and by the unexpected ways that poetry makes both possible at once. When was the last time you laughed out loud reading poems? Parker's new work is truly funny, exposing the impossibility of realism in a world where imagination is more trustworthy than experience.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781932195422
Publisher:	Tupelo Press, Incorporated
Publication date:	06/30/2012
Pages:	78
Sales rank:	512,671
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.10(d)

About the Author

ALAN MICHAEL PARKER is the author or editor of eighteen books, including THE AGE OF DISCOVERY (Tupelo Press, 2020), DAYS LIKE PROSE (WordFarm, 2019), THE LADDER: POEMS (Tupelo Press, 2016), LONG DIVISION (Tupelo Press, 2012), WHALE MAN (WordFarm, 2011), and THE IMAGINARY POETS (Tupelo Press, 2006). He teaches at Davidson College and in the University of Tampa's low-residency MFA program.

Editorial Reviews

The take-out menus in the lobby are so sleepy,/ they are so sore, they have swum oceans,” begins one poem in Parker’s sixth collection, endowing voice and pathos to the familiar ephemera clogging our nation’s porches and foyers. This gesture of compassionate attention to the marginal, humble pieces of a common life—a bench in a hospital garden, a rusted-out car on blocks—runs through Parker’s book, which draws on a range of formal registers in the process. (Some repeated forms include letters, numbered lists—e.g., “Sixteen Ways Old People Terrify the Young”—and quasi-fables.) At stake is how to reconcile the love, pleasure, and retrospective cast of a middle-aged mind with the less-thoughtful era of mercantile zoomburbs in which we find ourselves (a “zoomburb”? A “suburb growing even faster than a boomburb,” we learn). Here are also reflections on anniversaries, Italian opera, domestic life and its errant desires, third marriages, and fatherhood. The book’s best poems balance skepticism about the rituals of aging with the speaker’s participation in them. “My New American Lawn” thumbs its nose at the signifiers of lawn maintenance and suburban life, yet the poem also finds a well of urgency in “the crunchy, crispy, breakable/ blades.” (June)

Publishers Weekly