Editor, publisher, and poet Kevin Prufer presents his ninth poetry collection, The Fears, an intimate meditation on storytelling and mortality. “Ghostlit by streetlights” and filtered through tale and recollection, Prufer examines our fears of loss, death, and obscurity. Narratives are braided together as Prufer manipulates white space to mimic the silence of minds at work on unsolvable problems, how time “unravels / endlessly.” Here, visions of classical Greece and the trials of ancient Romans coexist with the everyday—memories of a parent’s death or the loss of a pet. We bear witness as the poet writes “to preserve the intricacy of [his] own mind / against the eventual / certainty of [his] absence.” Exploring what it means to be forgotten and how legacy is preserved through poetry, history books, a mummy’s index finger, and love letters from the grave, The Fears invites us to consider what it means to matter.
ISBN: 9781556596643
Format: Paperback
Reviews
“Picking up a collection of Prufer’s poems feels, to me at least, like settling into a favorite reading chair for the afternoon: he has found a form that mimics the way his own brain works, and given up the endless search for something new. A reader doesn’t have to learn a new language, and Prufer can focus on his real subject matter.”—Susanna Lang, Rhino Poetry
“In The Fears, his ninth collection, Kevin Prufer examines how each of us becomes “a dying animal body,” eventually losing what makes us human to sickness, grief, and even the indifference of the nation state. The poems place the ancient Greeks and Romans alongside vivdly rendered portraits of loved ones—a father dying of cancer, for instance—so that the epic, heroic past becomes a lens for meditating on the small, intimate tragedies of the present. . . . Bleak, clear-eyed, bracingly unsentimental, and insistent on the necessity of precise, accurate language, The Fears asks readers to remain politically engaged, to continue caring about the world. The poet urges us, even though we are mortal and will one day end up like Antigone, ‘nowhere,’ to keep paying attention to the vivid, haunting moments that comprise our lives: the broken finger of a mummy, a frozen bottle of wine, the ‘little pink tongue’ of a lost kitten.”—UNT Rilke Prize Winner, Judges Citation
“The Classical world has been many things to many writers—a world of austere beauty, of debauched lust and excess, of mystery cults or of reason and mathematical inquiry. For the Kevin Prufer of The Fears, though, it is primarily a vanished world, and in this respect a mirror reflecting our own future, where we fade first into, then out of, memory.” —Robert Archambeau, Hudson Review
“Classical history is a controlling conceit throughout The Fears. The book is filled with poems that evoke scenes of emperors and famous battles of antiquity. However, the poems never feel mired in the past. Instead, the past seems more like a tool for the speaker to begin to reckon with the fact that their present will soon be antiquity. Often, when poets use historical references in poems, they risk retreading well-worn territory or alienating their readers by burying their arguments in academic references. But [Prufer’s] work makes the historical elements feel fresh and necessary . . . an incredibly moving meditation on mortality and the ways in which we all struggle to leave our mark on the world.” —Keith Kopka, Adroit Journal