The Garage Elegies

Prolific poet, award-winning translator, esteemed critic—“certainly the best poetry critic in sight,” according to Lawrence Ferlinghetti—essayist and journalist, editor and novelist, Stephen Kessler has been a constant creative force in the American literary counterculture for more than fifty years. Rooted in his native California yet belonging to no particular school or movement, Kessler has absorbed and remixed the influence of poets as diverse as Charles Bukowski and Denise Levertov, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Edna St. Vincent Millay, Pablo Neruda and Rainer Maria Rilke. In Garage Elegies Kessler records with grief and wit, documentary realism and ranging imagination, poignancy and irony, a journey through the gains and losses of a lifetime. From the twenty-four numbered poems of the title (composed in the poet’s garage) to fanciful inventions like “My Gym at Midnight,” passionate meditations like “River Lovers,” and nightmarish visions like “Bedless in Bedlam,” his emotional honesty, conversational lyricism, and wry melancholy are at once dazzling and down to earth, heart-opening and consciousness-wrenching, retro-romantic and totally contemporary. Open this book to any page and find an unmistakably authentic voice