Bøger af Charles Rafferty

Charles Rafferty works in miniatures. These short short stories explore the small disasters of desire. They investigate the problems that ensue when, inevitably, his characters get what they wish for and what they deserve.

"In the world made by Charles Rafferty's poems, men travel with hawks in their suitcases, clouds of bees disrupt wedding receptions. Rafferty sees through "the concussed air of streetlamp, mall and interchange" to the small wild heart fluttering in the center of our mostly-tamed lives. But in these poems where "a bracelet of barbed wire, a pendant of living bees" might be decorations lies a love for all the risk and beauty of being human. Charles Rafferty is a poet of vision and imagination, and The Unleashable Dog is a mature and beautiful collection." -- Al Maginnes (from the back cover)

Charles Rafferty¿s latest collection of prose poems turns philosophical. In A Cluster of Noisy Planets, Rafferty captures the rhythms and patterns of life as a lover, father, and poet, distilling each moment to its essence and grounding them collectively in the wider perspective of a changing world, the constant turning of the stars and the changing seasons of the New England countryside. With a knowing nod to the passage of time¿day to day, year to year, epoch to epoch¿these lyrical poems form a record of the profound, ephemeral joys, losses, and echoes of commonplace moments.

Though it might not be yet apparent, what the world hungers for-not just the poetry world but all sentient beings-are the rapturous, precise, lyrical revelations in Charles Rafferty's Appetites, a startling collection full of poems that chart desire through an abandoned couch transformed into redeeming ecstasy, that channel the "popcorned and sawdusty air" of the circus tent where folks gather to turn away from themselves, that show us the subversive art of souvenir-taking in the form of a sliver of Picasso's signature smuggled under a fingernail, and that give us a "Prelude" for our time. In the vein of Stephen Dobyns and Denis Johnson, but ever original and even more expertly-crafted, Rafferty is a major American poet. If you don't know his work yet, you owe yourself this chapbook. -Ravi Shankar

Prose poems that turn conventional thought on its head, allowing magic to spring from mundane details of middle age life.