Milton’s God Where I-95 meets The Pike, a ponderous thunderhead flowered— stewed a minute, then flipped like a flash card, tattered edges crinkling in, linings so dark with excessive bright that, standing, waiting, at the overpass edge, the onlooker couldn’t decide until the end, or even then, what was revealed and what had been hidden. Using a variety of forms and achieving a range of musical effects, Nate Klug’s Anyone traces the unraveling of astonishment upon small scenes—natural and domestic, political and religious—across America’s East and Midwest. The book’s title foregrounds the anonymity it seeks through several means: first, through close observation (a concrete saw, a goshawk, a bicyclist); and, second, via translation (satires from Horace and Catullus, and excerpts from Virgil’s Aeneid). Uniquely among contemporary poetry volumes, Anyone demonstrates fluency in the paradoxes of a religious existence: “To stand sometime / outside my faith . . . or keep waiting / to be claimed in it.” Engaged with theology and the classics but never abstruse, all the while the poems remain grounded in the phenomenal, physical world of “what it is to feel: / moods, half moods, / swarming, then darting loose.”

Anyone (Phoenix Poets)

Literature & Fiction

Klug, Nate

Poetry

University of Chicago Press

Hosts and Guests: Poems (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets)

An exciting new collection from a poet whose debut was praised by Colorado Review as "a seduction by way of small astonishments" Nate Klug has been hailed by the Threepenny Review as a poet who is "an original in Eliot's sense of the word." In Hosts and Guests, his exciting second collection, Klug revels in slippery roles and shifting environments. The poems move from a San Francisco tech bar and a band of Pokémon Go players to the Shakers and St. Augustine, as they explore the push-pull between community and solitude, and past and present. Hosts and Guests gathers an impressive range: critiques of the "immiserated quiet" of modern life, love poems and poems of new fatherhood, and studies of a restless, nimble faith. At a time when the meanings of hospitality and estrangement have assumed a new urgency, Klug takes up these themes in chiseled, musical lines that blend close observation of the natural world, social commentary, and spiritual questioning. As Booklist has observed of his work, "The visual is rendered sonically, so perfectly one wants to involve the rest of the senses, to speak the lines, to taste the syllables."

United States

Princeton University Press

Poetry. "These poems occur between a wondering mind and the world, in the 'photic sneeze reflex' of spring blossoms, the flash of a cell-phone camera, the invisible edge of a concrete saw, and the sudden turbulence of a summer afternoon. These are moments of lyric intensity, sharply observed and finely wrought, delicate structures of wonder and art. Of course, wonder does not preclude irony. Our joys get caught in circuits of self-consciousness. Our freedoms prove fleeting and sometimes desperate, as when a jet-ski driver cuts his engine to coast through 'self-made / rain.' This is modern life, 'everything aiming // at everything / and just missing...' One poem asks, 'is this praise, then?' Praise and lament, both—twin strands of the mind's consent. Such are the roots of this compassionate poetry."—Devin Johnston

Consent

Pressed Wafer

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Books by Klug, Nate