Loosestrife

Stephen Dunn's wisdom and craft are once again on display in this new collection, his darkest and most brooding gaze into our lives to date. The poet's penetrating intelligence and mordant wit fixes on an America growing ever more stringent with its daily mercies, ever more withholding of daily opportunities for grace, for decency.

In the title poem and in the book as a whole, Dunn doesn't merely observe the world, he is a participant - willing and unwilling; his stance is always dual, complicit. He navigates through each paradox and conundrum of his moral, aesthetic, and erotic selves, careful to steer between the extremes of certainty or confusion, and travels to a place of exact and complicated vision.