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Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965-2016
Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965-2016 | Frank Bidart
3 posts | 2 read | 1 reading | 2 to read
The collected works of one of contemporary poetry's most original voicesGathered together, the poems of Frank Bidart perform one of the most remarkable transmutations of the body into language in contemporary literature. His pages represent the human voice in all its extreme registers, whether it's that of the child-murderer Herbert White, the obsessive anorexic Ellen West, the tormented genius Vaslav Nijinsky, or the poet's own. And in that embodiment is a transgressive empathy, one that recognizes our wild appetites, the monsters, the misfits, the misunderstood among us and inside us. Few writers have so willingly ventured to the dark places of the human psyche and allowed themselves to be stripped bare on the page with such candor and vulnerability. Over the past half century, Bidart has done nothing less than invent a poetics commensurate with the chaos and appetites of our experience.Half-light encompasses all of Bidart's previous books, and also includes a new collection, Thirst, in which the poet austerely surveys his life, laying it plain for us before venturing into something new and unknown. Here Bidart finds himself a "Creature coterminous with thirst," still longing, still searching in himself, one of the "queers of the universe." Visionary and revelatory, intimate and unguarded, Bidart's Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2017 are a radical confrontation with human nature, a conflict eternally renewed and reframed, restless line by restless line.
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BookishMarginalia
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#PulitzerPrize for #Poetry — have you checked this out, @WanderingBookaneer ?

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Redwritinghood
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Mehso-so

I finally finished this behemoth of a poetry collection! After 700 pages, I‘ve also finally finished all the books on the National Book Award shortlist for poetry. This one won the award, but it is my least favorite of the five. While there were many poems here that I loved, I also found many, particularly the earlier poems, much less accessible than the contemporary poetry from the other collections on the shortlist.

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Redwritinghood
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I have read all of the poetry collections from this year‘s National Book Award short list except this one. Of course, this is the one that won. It is far more lengthy than the others since it covers over 50 years of his work. Starting today with hopes to finish this month.

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