James Cummins's First Book Of Poems, The Whole Truth, became known throughout much of the poetry world as the Perry Mason Sestinas His second book, Portrait in a Spoon, was chosen by Richard Howard for the James Dickey Prize Contemporary Poetry Series. reflects the same inventiveness and wit evident in his earlier books, with a deepening of tone and spirit. The result is a collection of poems filled with feeling and with Cummins's signature anguished humor. If the language of poetry is a way into a hall of mirrors of the self, it can be a way out, too. The voice that emerges in Then & Now is...
James Cummins's First Book Of Poems, The Whole Truth, became known throughout much of the poetry world as the Perry Mason Sestinas His second book, Po...
By turns comic and poignant, the poems in Portrait in a Spoon explore the uses and abuses of language as it intersects the uses and abuses of power. Taking George Eliot's observation that even Milton, looking at himself in a spoon, would have to "submit to have the facial angle of a bumpkin," James Cummins investigates the question of identity-the illusions we sustain, the passions we conceal, and the stories that surround both. In his previous collection, The Whole Truth, Cummins rewrote to absurd and magisterial ends the Perry Mason saga. In this much-awaited second volume of poems, he...
By turns comic and poignant, the poems in Portrait in a Spoon explore the uses and abuses of language as it intersects the uses and abuses of power. T...
