David Keplinger

In a careful examination of personal and collective histories, David Keplinger’s Ice indexes the findings from memory’s slow melt—stories and faces we’ve forgotten, bones hidden in frost.“I am asking how much more / I have to learn from this,” Keplinger writes. “You are asking that same question.” In these poems, he turns to our predecessors for guidance in picking apart the forces that govern modernity—masculinity, power, knowledge, conquest. Cryptic visitants arrive in the form of Gilgamesh, “searching for a way to stay in pain forever”; a grandmother mending socks, “her face in the dark unchanging”; Emily Dickinson, lingering at her window; a lion cub, asleep in ice for millennia. With each comes a critique of the Anthropocene, our drive to possess the unpossessable. With each comes also the discovery of what—and who—we’ve harmed in the discovering. Ice shelves collapse. Climate change melts layers of permafrost to reveal a severed wolf’s head. A pair of grease-smudged reading glasses calls up a mother’s phantom. “I am sorry / for the parts you gave me / that I’ve misshapen,” Keplinger writes. So is there “a point to all this singing”? Our ancestors cannot answer. The wolf’s head can’t, either. But sometimes, “out of the snow of confusion,” something answers, “saying gorgeous things like yes.” And the flowers “open up / their small green trumpets anyway.”

"Renowned poet and translator, David Keplinger authors his seventh original poetry collection. The World to Come is an investigation of possible and impossible worlds, where the fields of science and alchemy, astronomy and astrology, intersect as they once did in the Medieval and earlier mystical traditions. The worlds of its title are those of weather, the imagination, literature, planetary systems, and even other dimensions. David Keplinger extends Dante's visit to the concentric spheres, for the sake of disrupting the past's hold on our visions of the future."

The Long Answer gleans from David Keplinger's five previous poetry collections, covering two decades of his engagement with the lyric narrative. Through echoes of Dickinson, Rimbaud, William Blake, and the French prose poet Max Jacob, as well as a host of other European and American voices, this volume maps the ongoing 'long answer' to the poet's individual inquiries about family, influence, and originality while at the same time tapping the source and substance of a more far-flung, philosophical problem. How is one life both distinct from and the sum of lives that came before? How does one disentangle oneself from the illusion of separateness? Culling together the best work from those previous years, and with nearly forty new pages of material, The Long Answer seeks a question, in Keplinger's title poem, "so old, no one remembers/ what was asked for/in the first place,/and which leaves us . . . /with only each other." His work, here, and historically, seeks less to alter thinking than to undrape it, where poetry can be the means of remembering what we are.

WINNER OF THE UNT RILKE PRIZE How does it feel to experience another city? To stand beneath tall buildings, among the countless faces of a crowd? To attempt to be heard above the din? The poems of Another City travel inward and outward at once: into moments of self-reproach and grace, and to those of disassociation and belonging. From experiences defined by an urban landscape—a thwarted customer at the door of a shuttered bookstore in Crete, a chance encounter with a might-have-been lover in Copenhagen—to the streets themselves, where “an alley was a comma in the agony’s grammar,” in David Keplinger’s hands startling images collide and mingle like bodies on a busy thoroughfare. Yet Another City deftly spans not only the physical space of global cities, but more intangible and intimate distances: between birth and death, father and son, past and present, metaphor and reality. In these poems, our entry into the world is when “the wound, called loneliness, / opens,” and our voyage out of it is through a foreign but not entirely unfamiliar constellations of cities: Cherbourg, Manila, Port-au-Prince. This is a rich portrait of the seemingly incommunicable expanses between people, places, and ideas—and the ability of a poem to transcend the void.

Poetry. THE MOST NATURAL THING is like a series of x-rays symmetrical square boxes made of language, in which language is describing the anatomy of one body, and this body becomes a container of information about science, myth, memory, history, and dream. Think about a community of trees all sharing one clump of tangled roots underground, a kind of heart though above ground they seem to be separate entities. The book looks at what is separate on the surface and tries throughout to find that tangled heart."

Born in 1966, Nielsen works as a full time writer in Aarhus, the second largest Danish city, an academic and cultural center located on the peninsula of Jutland. Aarhus is also the home of the Grauballe Man, a bog man 2000 years old and displayed year round at Moesgaard Museum in a wooded area south of the city. This man, his cut open throat, his fractured shin, his beard stubble, his skin--even his fingerprints--preserved by the tannins of the bog, though flattened by its tremendous weight, lies displayed under glass, a ghastly testament to our common tribal past. I find in Nielsen's poems a similar spectacle--the little glass box of form, and, within, something old, nasty, fascinating, human.

Keplinger's third book of poetry alters course from his usual style. The book is made up of linking prose poems, almost in series. They are rich with startling images, strange symbolism, and fantastic places and people.