The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World
Paul Guest
1-930974-27-2
$14.00 Trade Paper

Winner of the 2002 New Issus Poetry Prize

“Paul Guest’s poems are infused with tenderness toward the world despite its harsh indifference toward us. Literally and metaphorically, these are poems scratched out with a stick held between the teeth. And they manage to fashion, from life’s rough lot, testaments of good faith to the flesh, the world, the word, and love in all its various garments.”

                 —Lucia Perillo

“Filled with irony, fantastic leaps of imagination and a poetic maturity most poets don’t achieve for several books, this incredible debut works dialectically to resurrect our world among all its broken bodies. Here is a voice smart enough and sentient enough to know that the pain and the love of that world are two sides of the proverbial coin—a poet who, like Stevens’ eagle, clearly sees the infinite alps of our emotions as a single nest.”

                 —Richard Jackson

“From my first encounter with Paul Guest’s poetry, I have thought of him as one of the most brilliant poets in America. His gifts are many: lyrical spontaneity, quirky inventiveness, profundity, emotional wisdom, and unfailing lucidity. His poems bring at once both range and focus, wit and seriousness. Indeed, Guest makes no distinction between light and dark subject matter. The accomplishment of his poems translates everything into delight.”

                 —Rodney Jones

Paul Guest was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and raised in Georgia. He received a B.A. in Humanities from the University of Tennessee and an M.F.A. from Southern Illinois University. His poems have appeared in Slate, The Iowa Review, Mid-American Review, Pleiades, Quarterly West, Third Coast, and elsewhere. He currently teaches at the University of Alabama.