Slower Than Stars
by Steve Mueske

Description

Taking up where A Mnemonic for Desire left off, with a song “forming out of nothing,” Steve Mueske’s second collection, Slower than Stars, is by turns playful, irreverent, surreal, and deeply lyrical. His poems, often philosophical, are informed by writers such as Kafka, Joyce, and Nietzsche; artists Paul Klee, Andy Warhol, Man Ray, and Jan Groover; as well as the work of poets, photographers, and musicians.  One moment, the coyote and the sheep dog are employed as adversaries in a poem about “the death of love.” Another moment, a factory worker is busy packaging shadows. But Mueske has a serious side as well: whether writing about the extinction of the black rhino, his personal battle with depression and suicidal ideations, the early lives of his children, or the pain of watching a loved one succumb to dementia, he opens himself up to the reader with an artful transparency. Eight years in the making, these poems span fifteen years of Mueske’s life.

Comments:

“Steve Mueske’s imagination is relentless, audacious. It allows us to glimpse Kung fu movies, the afterlife, a black rhino, and Sisyphus in new light that jolts, thrills. It pulses with emotive grace. He braids weariness and song, wit and elation into lines that burn with ‘dark mojo’ and a ‘vocabulary of falling snow.’ There are poems in this book I wish I’d written.”  (Eduardo C. Corral, author of Slow Lightning, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poet)

“Always surprising, always delighting in the luminescence of the uncanny, Steve Mueske’s Slower than Stars is a wonder: Its engagements with language are so frenetic and celebratory that the collection’s numberless juxtapositions of tone and diction and discourse always seem of a piece. At the core of these exacting, exhilarating poems is an anxiety over living—and living well—that finds its expression in the wit, good humor, and uncompromising iterability of language’s questioning spirit.”  (Seth Abramson, author of Thievery)