Tropical Depressions (Iowa Poetry Prize Series) - Softcover

"There's an awful lot of blood, mucus, urine, and semen dripping through these poems." "American Book Review"" "The struggle to resist what is easy, what is expected, is what brings delight after delight for the reader. Not only does Glaser resist using strict form in poetry, but he also adds that he wants to 'deconstruct nostalgias, ' which pokes fun at the serious literary theorists, while it peels away at what he has lived through, what he is forced to live as the stable family man/teacher, in order to get at his core or at least at that troubled, energetic self that seems to haunt most of his best work." "The And Review""

Robert Frost's ovenbird question was, 'What to make of a diminished thing?' This new volume of poetry by Elton Glaser answers that question on a personal level, by broadening the sense of loss and exile until it envelops our common concerns of the twentieth century: the loss of love, faith, civility - all the old verities diminished and distorted. While the first two sections of the book raise exuberant laments for the domestic, artistic, amatory, and religious life, the third section of poems moves beyond complaint to celebration. The complainer, purged of his grievances, leaves behind a northern exile and moves somewhere closer to home. In these final poems, Glaser returns to the South and his native city of New Orleans. Without nostalgia for the romance of moonlit magnolias, without denial of the region's dark past, he voices a more measured, more settled view of the world, one of balance and hard-won acceptance.