New poetry by the acclaimed writer Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City and The Ticking Is the Bomb electrocution, no―the boy stood in the hot-hot room stammering I did stammering I did stammering I did stammering I did stammering everything you say I did I did. ―from "Fire" The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands is Nick Flynn's first new poetry collection in nearly a decade. What begins as a meditation on love and the body soon breaks down into a collage of voices culled from media reports, childhood memories, testimonies from Abu Ghraib detainees, passages from documentary films, overheard conversations, and scraps of poems and song, only to reassemble with a gathering sonic force. It's as if all the noise that fills our days were a storm, yet at the center is a quiet place, but to get there you must first pass through the storm, with eyes wide open, singing. Each poem becomes a hallucinatory, shifting experience, through jump cut, lyric persuasion, and deadpan utterance. This is an emotional, resilient response to some of the essential issues of our day by one of America's riskiest and most innovative writers.
Author
Nick Flynn is an American poet, memoirist, and playwright. His most famous book is a memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. He has published two collections of poetry: Blind Huber, and Some Ether, which won the inaugural PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Further honors include a 2001 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2001 Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, and the 1999 Discovery/The Nation Award for his poem, Bag of Mice, about his mother's suicide. Flynn earned an Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from New York University and teaches part-time at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program. He used to teach at Columbia University, where he was a poet and educator. He lives in New York and is married to the actress, Lili Taylor, with whom he has a daughter, Maeve. Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
