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The Dark Side

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Every night after I finish work, I sit down to write this essay, and every night I fail. And failure, believe it or not, is one of the best things... Continue »

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Other titles in the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets series:

Curses and Wishes: Poems

by Carl Adamshick

ISBN13: 9780807137765
ISBN10: 0807137766
Condition: Standard
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Awards

2012 Oregon Book Award for Poetry

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

The unusual voice encountered in Curses and Wishes carries a quiet, slightly elevated conversational tone, which flows from intimate secrets to wider social concerns. The poet has faith in economy and trusts in images to transfer knowledge that speech cannot.

In Curses and Wishes the short, simple lines add up to a thoughtful book possessed with lyrical melancholy, a harmony of sadness and joy that sing: "May happiness be a wheel, a lit throne, spinning / in the vast pinprick of darkness." By the close of this ambitious work the poet has inspired readers to see the multifaceted effects of our human connections.

About the Author

Carl Adamshick received an Oregon Literary Fellowship from Literary Arts and is a cofounder of Tavern Books. His poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, the Harvard Review, the Missouri Review, American Poet, and Narrative magazine.

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: Casey Twining, January 22, 2012 (view all comments by Casey Twining)
Adamshick has a veteran poet's eye, and the ease. His poems are rooted in small, discrete movements within the lines themselves, transitioning and adjusting so tactfully and seamlessly you would swear he was a bird in his last life, or the glossed surface of leaf. The checklist is present: metaphor, personification, mood, meaning-the stuff of poetry. Where the poem rolls, how it leaps, falls, opens and closes right in front of you is less clear. His poetry is a little like Portland in this way, glorious in the light of day, but quietly rooting around...nameless, a little tilted to the side, wearing its hard-won knowledge under a thick rubber jacket. "Curses and Wishes" is exactly what it feels like it should be: surrender and repair; surrender to your darker self, and an olive branch into those depths. The fact that the book was chosen for the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets is not too shabby either, if you are into that sort of thing, however the poems speak for themselves. Wouldn't you like to know how the graceful half lives? Take an afternoon and touch these pages, read these words, and find out.
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Product Details

ISBN:: 9780807137765
Author:: Adamshick, Carl
Publisher:: Louisiana State University Press
Author:: Adamshick, Carl
Subject:: Poetry-A to Z
Publication Date:: 20110431
Binding:: TRADE PAPER
Language:: English

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