Poetry. Robert Fanning is a graduate of the University of Michigan and Sarah Lawrence College. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, the Atlanta Review, and several other journals. His chapbook Old Bright Wheel was the winner of the Ledge Press Chapbook Award. "Robert Fanning's poems originate from some uncanny place between a fevered imagination and a keen intellect. They are musical, dangerous poems-both sparing and wild. This poet searches for language and meaning in a mysterious world. What the poems offer, instead, is more mystery"-Laura Kasischke. "Passionate and accomplished-this poet's ear is beautifully tuned-THE SEED THIEVES is an urgent, nervous, tender, and brilliant first book. Read it for joy!"-Thomas Lux. "Tonight, my satellite,/boot up, log on, give me long, slow/sentences. Lean out your window, describe/your present world. Decipher every bright thing/across the immediate sky, over the currents/and moonlit contours of your country"-from the book.

The Seed Thieves

Literature & Fiction

Fanning, Robert

Poetry

Marick Press

With elegies to a brother, sister and father at the core, Robert Fanning's third poetry collection examines what sustains in us in spite of loss. In richly sonic and poignant lyrics, we witness the wilder forces beyond our bastions of safety-of the beauty and devastation that we cannot contain and to which we eventually succumb. In poems alternately harrowing and humorous, bright and bittersweet, Fanning looks beyond grief to his children and the world to come, in a tenacious celebration of both impermanence and of what endures. Robert Fanning is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Central Michigan University in Mt. Pleasant, MI.

Our Sudden Museum

Salmon Poetry

In his fourth full-length collection, Robert Fanning takes a dramatic leap into a liminal world. In poems both measured and free, both cadenced and incantatory, we follow two marionettes--Professor and Grief--who search for a life untethered and authentic. Crossing from day into night, from wood into flesh, from wakefulness into dream, from ice into thaw, Severance sings of a way--through the narrows of time and body--toward healing."Lush with invented compound words and quirky rhymes, the poems in Severance represent a confluence of timeless allegory, hallucination, and rock opera staged in a puppet theater lit by a tinfoil sun. In a collection that describes a sequence of devastating losses from the point of view of an Ishmael-like survivor, Grief serves as a sort of interlocutor, at once companion, instigator, enemy, doctor, prophet, and god. Fanning enacts lyricism-as-salvation in songs 'all contusion and blue' which tamp the wound, snip the strings of fate, and open the scarlet curtain into day."Diane Seussauthor of Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and A Girl, and Four-Legged Girl, Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize"In Severance, his fourth full-length book of poems, Robert Fanning has severed the strings from the poet as marionette--the poet tied to poetic form, tethered to how a poem takes its shape and moves about on the page--to make a book like no other. Prepare to be undone, unhinged, unstrung by the strange song that is this book. Prepare for its strangeness to rearrange everything you believed a book of poems might be."Peter Markusauthor of the novel Bob, or Man on Boat"Robert Fanning's Severance contains a large grief miniaturized and given a proscenium stage and a script. Here, a Professor converses with Grief in between Oldsongs that have the music of a lullaby in a performance of orchards and snow that wants to make an order out of the cold eternity. The metaphors change with each angle, circling and closing in on a message, a meaning in the difficulties of loss. This book helps me see the beauty of a grief master, a puppeteer who uses grief to activate the gone, as if our pain for those we've lost is the song that keeps them dancing in the Winterland. It's not life, but something like it, until we finally, mercifully, cut the tethers and truly let those we've lost go on without us."Traci Brimhallauthor of Saudade, Our Lady of the Ruins, and Rookery

Severance

Genre Fiction

Poetry. At once lyrical, humorous, heartbreaking, bitter, and wry--this engaging collection introduces a character like none other seen in the history of poetry. AMERICAN PROPHET is a collection of poems that details the sojourns of a so-called Prophet across the American landscape, from coastal beaches to strip malls to cities to heartland farms. As the Prophet tries continually but fails to reach "his people," his urgent messages go unnoticed or get swallowed by the machines and cacophony of contemporary America.

American Prophet

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Fanning, Robert. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Fanning, Robert

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Fanning, Robert. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Seed Thieves

Our Sudden Museum

Severance

American Prophet