The Man Who Sleeps in My Office

by Jason Sommer

Overview

With grace and style, Jason Sommer considers how to live in the wake of history among those who are indelibly marked by it. On the surface a book of poems composed in the shadow of the Holocaust, The Man Who Sleeps in My Office offers more than a poetic chronicle of suffering and loss. Instead, Sommer—the son of a survivor—has discovered a delicate balance that allows him to be in and of history without succumbing to it. In these works, both the seen and the unseen—the failed or rejected vision—alter the seer, as the limit of one thing becomes the verge of something else. Whether about the Holocaust, the dog he'll never own, or love between a husband and wife or parent and child, these poems savor the mysterious instant when alternatives of vision unfold. While these moments may also conjure loss, the losses are made good, as when, in "Legion," someone forgets why he has walked into a room but salvages from the lapse not the purpose of the errand but a sense of the ultimate worth of a life. These finely crafted narrative poems tell the story of these unanticipated perceptions, when the ordinary opens to the very human story of failed understanding and quiet epiphany.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226768038
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	04/20/2004
Series:	Phoenix Poets
Edition description:	1
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 8.70(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Jason Sommer is professor of English and Poet-in-Residence at Fontbonne University in St. Louis, Missouri. He is the author of two books of poems, most recently Other People's Troubles, published by the University of Chicago Press, which was honored with the Society for Midland Authors award for poetry. Sommer also received a Whiting Writers' Award in 2001.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

What They Saw
Visiting the Camp
Reign
Robert and the Same Thought
My Mother Making Faces
An Origin of Prayer
Coming
The Man Who Stopped
Pretty Bird
The Man at the Art House
Vision
Air Over Fire
Sacrifice
Elegy
The New People
Civilization
The Man Who Sleeps in My Office
Man Abroad
Legion
Crow of the Galápagos
Lines, in the Reflexive
Pylon Man
The Dog I'll Never Own
The Long Flight Almost Over
His Mother Calling
The Voices

Recipe

With grace and style, Jason Sommer considers how to live in the wake of history among those who are indelibly marked by it. On the surface a book of poems composed in the shadow of the Holocaust, The Man Who Sleeps in My Office offers more than a poetic chronicle of suffering and loss. Instead, Sommer—the son of a survivor—has discovered a delicate balance that allows him to be in and of history without succumbing to it. In these works, both the seen and the unseen—the failed or rejected vision—alter the seer, as the limit of one thing becomes the verge of something else. Whether about the Holocaust, the dog he'll never own, or love between a husband and wife or parent and child, these poems savor the mysterious instant when alternatives of vision unfold. While these moments may also conjure loss, the losses are made good, as when, in "Legion," someone forgets why he has walked into a room but salvages from the lapse not the purpose of the errand but a sense of the ultimate worth of a life. These finely crafted narrative poems tell the story of these unanticipated perceptions, when the ordinary opens to the very human story of failed understanding and quiet epiphany.