Stephen Corey's carefully observed poems range in subject matter from the trivial ("The Uselessness of American Counties") to the mysterious ("Agnostic") to the resigned ("Divorce"). A thread runs through them all, though, a controlling intelligence and a subtle compassion that makes them of a piece in the way of William Stafford's best writing. "Hearing with My Son," about a child's struggle with autism, is stunning, and "The Invention of the Villanelle" will leave you muttering to yourself for days.

Synchronized swimming

Literature & Fiction

Corey, Stephen

Poetry

Additional copies, Swallow's Tale Press

Stephen Corey's first full-length collection is now available in a reprint. Corey's light touch is always welcome, whether it be a poem of love or a political poem about the uselessness of American counties.

The Last Magician

Swallows Tale Pr

Stephen Corey's first full-length collection is now available in a reprint. Corey's light touch is always welcome, whether it be a poem of love or a political poem about the uselessness of American counties.

The last magician

Water Mark Press

The last magician (Water Mark poets first book award series)

Stephen Corey's carefully observed poems range in subject matter from the trivial ("The Uselessness of American Counties") to the mysterious ("Agnostic") to the resigned ("Divorce"). A thread runs through them all, though, a controlling intelligence and a subtle compassion that makes them of a piece in the way of William Stafford's best writing. "Hearing with My Son," about a child's struggle with autism, is stunning, and "The Invention of the Villanelle" will leave you muttering to yourself for days.

Synchronized Swimming

Black Belt Press

About the Author\nStephen Corey worked at the Georgia Review for thirty-six years in various positions including thirteen year as Editor before retiring in 2019. His first two poetry collections, The Last Magician (Water Mark Press, 1981) and Synchronized Swimming (Swallow’s Tale Press, 1984), were winners of national competitions. All These Lands You Call One Country (University of Missouri Press, 1992) and There Is No Finished World (White Pine Press, 2003) followed, and a half-dozen poetry chapbooks were interspersed along the way. His first prose collection was Startled at the Big Sound: Essays Personal, Literary, and Cultural (Mercer University Press, 2017), and a second is in process.\nA career-spanning volume drawn from forty years of work and a selection of new poems.\nStephen Corey’s work is intelligent, moving and engaging. Poem after poem is beautiful, effortless, and thought-provoking. The range of style and subject matter, the depth of thought and emotion, the elegance and resonance and simplicity of language, the affectionate voice and tone―all work to make this a truly important and memorable book.\n“Here is a life, and a life, and / a life,” Stephen Corey writes in the opening poem’s instructions to on how find the faded leaf―also a metaphor for the end of life―that one must imagine still colored after he is “gone.” The poem is echoed near the end of this stunningly rich and encompassing book in a poem addressed to his four daughters about what he has missed during his life. In between we encounter a world we thought we knew but have not seen in this way before: things as varied as Monarch butterflies, telephones, calligraphy, and bread, as well as other writers and texts that become lenses to show us “How we are growing undoes what we are” and see. 
Like the glassblower’s art in one of these major poems, “Breath makes another world.” And like his Michelangelo in a sequence that masterfully covers centuries, we see “the way a life we love can be steered, / beyond our control, beyond us.” And so, thanks to this important and needed book we too can live beyond ourselves; that, indeed, is the highest praise for any art.” 
―Richard Jackson, author of Broken Horizons and Where the Wind Comes From\n“Stephen Corey’s, As My Age Then Was, So I Understood Them, is sometimes bookish, in the best ways, and in addition to welcoming many of the stars in our pantheon (Shakespeare, O’Keeffe, Keats, Ginsberg, Woolf, and Whitman for example) there’s also the dual elegy for the poet’s father and Dickinson (the latter also has her own baseball poem), Emerson ‘at the moment of his first masturbation,” and a sequence in which Li Po and Tu Fu hop on a jet and tour America. What this means is that when Corey forays into “the real world” ―keeping a hospital death watch, exploring and exalting carnal love, or delighting in his young daughter “playing Beethoven on my chest” ― the poems are informed by both of his masters… by the “shelves of books” that are “the bones of my brain.”” 
―Albert Goldbarth\nStephen Corey worked at the Georgia Review for thirty-six years in various positions including thirteen year as Editor before retiring in 2019. His first two poetry collections, The Last Magician (Water Mark Press, 1981) and Synchronized Swimming (Swallow’s Tale Press, 1984), were winners of national competitions. All These Lands You Call One Country (University of Missouri Press, 1992) and There Is No Finished World (White Pine Press, 2003) followed, and a half-dozen poetry chapbooks were interspersed along the way. His first prose collection was Startled at the Big Sound: Essays Personal, Literary, and Cultural (Mercer University Press, 2017), and a second is in process.

As My Age Then Was, So I Understood Them: New and Selected Poems, 1981-2020

White Pine Press

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