Synopses & Reviews
Aswirl with waking dreams and phantom memories,
The Late Parade is a triumph of poetic imagination.
To write about one thing, you must first write about another. In Adam Fitzgerald's debut collection, readers discover forty-eight poems that yoke together tones playful and elegiac, nostalgic and absurd. Fitzgerald's shape-shifting inspirations "beckon us to join an urban promenade" (McLane) with a multiplicity of chimerical stops: from the unreal cities of Dubai to the former Soviet Union, from Nigerian spammers and the Virgin Mary to Dr. Johnson and Cat Power.
"The glory of this volume is the long title poem, which carries the primal vision of Hart Crane into a future that does not surrender the young poet’s love of the real," writes Harold Bloom. Mash-ups of litanies, monologues and odes, these poems spring from a modernist landscape filled with madcap slips of tongue, innuendo, archaisms and everyday slang. Though Fitzgerald's lines often hallucinate meanings that feel open-ended, they never ignore the traditional pleasures of poetic craft and memory, their music an ambient drone—part Technicolor, part nitrous oxide.
Even so, what glues these fantasies together is more than the charm of the maddeningly chameleon rhetoric. Fitzgerald's sonorous voice is unabashedly that of a love poet's: melancholic, baroque and visionary. The Late Parade is a testament to the powers of confusion, which may disguise our sense of loss but offer in return that eloquent tonic known as poetry. As Richard Howard writes, "When the new poet turns up the heat, he gives us just the necessary outrages which make us understand what we never knew we could say."
Review
"Adam Fitzgerald is a master of defeating expectations so as to fulfill them farther along. One has the feeling of climbing higher along a path that is giving way under one's feet, in pursuit always of 'a waltz on our breath.' Yet the rhythmic and consonant commotion of these poems ends in joy. This is a dazzling debut." John Ashbery
Review
"Wildly alive with the grit and glue of broken objects and the noise of lost things. You can count on the immense care he takes in putting music back into the world. You can count on the fact this is a book we will read for years to come." Dorothea Lasky
Review
"Released from the plod of workaday logics and handed over to the flow of their own becoming, the poems in shudder with exhilarating assurance and nonstop invention, never fully breaking it off with the familiar, but incapable of leaving it untransformed. We've been waiting too long for a book like this to arrive. Wake up--it's finally here." Timothy Donnelly
Review
"May be the beginning of a great career." Harold Bloom
Review
"Adam Fitzgerald joins an estimable line—a parade?—from Crane to Ashbery to Donnelly. Fitzgerald is truly 'a noble rider' of 'the sound of words,' to invoke Stevens. We confront here a surging ocean of sound and language, but also a sharp mind, ascetic, even astringent." Maureen McLane
Synopsis
"Fitzgerald's voice is a new and welcome sound in the aviary of contemporary poetry."--David Kirby,
Synopsis
"The glory of this volume is the long title poem, which carries the primal vision of Hart Crane into a future that does not surrender the young poet s love of the real," writes Harold Bloom. Mash-ups of litanies, monologues and odes, these poems spring from a modernist landscape filled with madcap slips of tongue, innuendo, archaisms and everyday slang. Though Fitzgerald's lines often hallucinate meanings that feel open-ended, they never ignore the traditional pleasures of poetic craft and memory, their music an ambient drone part Technicolor, part nitrous oxide.
Even so, what glues these fantasies together is more than the charm of the maddeningly chameleon rhetoric. Fitzgerald's sonorous voice is unabashedly that of a love poet's: melancholic, baroque and visionary. The Late Parade is a testament to the powers of confusion, which may disguise our sense of loss but offer in return that eloquent tonic known as poetry. As Richard Howard writes, "When the new poet turns up the heat, he gives us just the necessary outrages which make us understand what we never knew we could say."
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Synopsis
Aswirl with waking dreams and phantom memories, is a triumph of poetic imagination. . In Adam Fitzgerald's debut collection, readers discover forty-eight poems that yoke together tones playful and elegiac, nostalgic and absurd. Fitzgerald's shape-shifting inspirations "beckon us to join an urban promenade" (McLane) with a multiplicity of chimerical stops: from the unreal cities of Dubai to the former Soviet Union, from Nigerian spammers and the Virgin Mary to Dr. Johnson and Cat Power.
About the Author
Adam Fitzgerald lives in New York City and is the founding editor of the poetry journal Maggy. He teaches creative writing and literature at The New School and Rutgers University.