Thomas Lux has called Stephen Dobyns “one of the very finest poets writing in America today. His poems are brave, ravenous, intensely moving, and utterly his own.” The poems in his new volume, Mystery, So Long, use both free verse and traditional forms to examine life’s complications and peculiar joys, in language that varies from the staid to the hysteric and in situations ranging from the commonplace to the mythic. Humor, surprise, the absurd, and the ferocious are used as so many picks and shovels to further Dobyns’s dark explorations in this powerful collection. From “Mystery, So Long” At first, it filled the space around us with holes, the mystery. It was scary. People fell through them. There goes Og, people might say. They sang hymns to the mystery. They pounded on drums. They fed the mystery both friends and strangers. It seemed a good idea. The mystery hungered for human flesh. Oh, implacable and mysterious mystery.
Author
Dobyns was raised in New Jersey, Michigan, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. He was educated at Shimer College, graduated from Wayne State University, and received an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1967. He has worked as a reporter for the Detroit News. He has taught at various academic institutions, including Sarah Lawrence College, the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers, the University of Iowa, Syracuse University, and Boston University. In much of his poetry and some works of non-genre fiction, Dobyns employs extended tropes, using the ridiculous and the absurd as vehicles to introduce more profound meditations on life, love, and art. He shies neither from the low nor from the sublime, and all in a straightforward narrative voice of reason. His journalistic training has strongly informed this voice.
