The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World

Rating:
Summary: Dark, haunting
Review: Paul Guest writes stark, knifelike poems. Each one is a perfect, shivering cataclysm. Guest's understated voice is a monologue of unraveling, the effect culminating until you're left laughing giddily in a kind of shock. This collection reads sort of like a 94-page "The Second Coming". I think it's great.

Rating:
Summary: Dark, haunting
Review: Paul Guest writes stark, knifelike poems. Each one is a perfect, shivering cataclysm. Guest's understated voice is a monologue of unraveling, the effect culminating until you're left laughing giddily in a kind of shock. This collection reads sort of like a 94-page "The Second Coming". I think it's great.

Rating:
Summary: In Case of Rapture
Review: This book should be taken with you or taken up after the reader--no doubt enraptured in awe and swept-off--dropped it. These poems are pathos gift-wrapped in the comic and the human. The book has authority, the heft and agility rarely encountered in first books. These poems are beautiful in the way that "Great Poetry" can be beautiful but they are spoken in a voice so natural, so conversational that their beauty seems organic to them: that daffodil that opens early and braves frost and seems to stand not so much for the pretty-flowers-of-early-spring-and-The-Poet-behind-lace-curtains-billowing(& bellowing)-out-of "daffodil poetry" but to stand sturdy and against ice and bitterness in a gravel parking lot of a world and in so doing surprises even itself by its ability to perservere. These poems are about brokeness and bodies and the way bodies break and refuse to break. They are beauty unaware of their own beauty, aware only of a world in need of saving graces and madcap comics, of failed scripts for the three stooges. They are poems of awareness, unflinching in their measure of pain and bliss, their acknowledgement that to be human is to arrive with the potential and promise of erosion. For that awareness of what is offered and what cannot always be accepted, there is this voice, this rapturous debut and this poetry which is, (read this book and see for yourself) no small wonder.