Insomniac Liar of Topo

Norman Dubie

The poems in Norman Dubie’s The Insomniac Liar of Topo behave much like a linear particle accelerator: they explode worlds into each other with tremendous speed in order to discover the worlds within. Populated by a menagerie of mystics, holy men, and artists, Dubie’s poems bring together the astonishingly grotesque and sardonically beautiful to call forth the sincere within the context of war and human dissonance.

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ISBN: 9781556592638

Format: Paperback

George Herbert

We’d come back against the rain
looking for an old book of poems
I’d left on a red granite shelf
above a radiator
with wet rags of chalk, mostly
holidays and train schedules,
burning on it.

We’d been in the post office
shipping a manuscript to Estonia,
but noticed instead a green pen
and its long chain, the plastic stalk
chewed by a very nervous
animal only inches long—my daughter

thought we should name this naughty
toothy creature
still wild in a small village in Vermont…

I said, “Okay, George Herbert,”
she giggled, and the winter rain
lightened to snow
and our early supper, I remember,
was absolutely delicious.
Some whitefish with carrots.

About the Author

Norman Dubie [1945–2023] is the author of thirty books of poetry, most recently Robert Schumann Is Mad Again. His previous volume, The Quotations of Bone, won the 2016 Griffin International Poetry Prize. His other books of poetry include The Volcano, Insomniac Liar of Topo, Ordinary Mornings of a Coliseum, and The Mercy Seat: Collected & New Poems, 1967–2001, all from Copper Canyon Press. His poems have appeared in such magazines as The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Narrative, Blackbird, …

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Reviews

“Dubie has already been recognized as one of the most powerful and influential American poets… his poems have always been generous and inclusive, capable of containing multiple and conflicting worlds—of memory and the present, of the artistic and the daily.” —Washington Post Book World

“Dubie has a singular talent for inhabiting a persona and making convincing representations of another person’s life, taking on a different view and experience of the world… It is the tenderness of his identifications that make Dubie’s work so extraordinary.” —Boston Review