Overview

Adam Day's Left-Handed Wolf offers short lyrical meditations and narratives that wrestle with contemporary issues of the environment, spirituality, and the social. These compact, imagistic poems welcome space and silence as a way of addressing both the commonality and complexity of people and experience. Day's poems- influenced by meditation practice, as well as by classical Japanese and Chinese verse- are serious and bawdy, reverential and impertinent, accessible and eclectic, yet unified in their tone, atmosphere, and sensibility.

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9780807171073

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Reviews

Day navigates the tensions between breadth and precision, and between the historical and the personal, in his excellent debut collection. Through a range of forms, he creates a liminal space wherein references to strange historical anecdotes share a stage with more introspective and personal utterances. Through this balancing act, what seems remote becomes highly accessible and mysteriously familiar...In the process of weaving his materials together, he draws his readers into a sort of collective memory, thus fostering a sense of community...Day masterfully conjoins the still life with the moving landscape, the expansive with the infinitesimal...This act of cracking and reassembling is a constant struggle, but there's merit in the struggle itself. --Publishers Weekly Adam Day's Left-Handed Wolf is a set of short poems, ranging from two to seventeen lines, written in the long wake of Issa and Basho, which manages to surprise at every turn. Day has a good ear, but these are not 'pretty' poems. Instead they refresh perception. Here we find ourselves treading the 'Mahogany water / of the mare's dead eye.'--Rae Armantrout, author of Versed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry In Left-Handed Wolf, Adam Day has crafted lines of brevity and precision without the least hint of preciousness; instead, the reader finds sharp juxtapositions of language, imagery, and sound. These are not-quite-haiku hewn from the materials of our soiled world. Beauty exists, but it's smudged, sullied, and sometimes horrific. In this raw, engaging, gorgeously observed collection, Day explores the compromised beauty of our world.--Laura Sims, author of Staying Alive

Author Information

Adam Day is the author of Model of a City in Civil War. He is the recipient of a PEN Emerging Writers Prize, a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship, and an Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council. His poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Boston Review, the Kenyon Review, ​and elsewhere. He lives in Louisville, Kentucky, where he directs the Baltic Writing Residency.

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