A Place at the Table: Poems

Literature & Fiction

Orlen, Steve

Poetry

Henry Holt Company

HOLT. RINEHART AND WINSTON

The fifth book by poet Steve Orlen, who is known for his passionate, truth-telling explorations of the inner life. His language is colloquial and easy of access, and his manner deceptively off-hand, considering his sometimes disturbing subjects (including dark secrets of the American male psyche).

This Particular Eternity

Ausable Press

The fifth book by poet Steve Orlen, who is known for his passionate, secret-spilling explorations of the inner life. His language is colloquial, accessible, and frequently very funny. He writes about sometimes-dark subjects, particularly childhood and adolescence, with hindsight that illuminates and transforms them.

In these new poems from Steve Orlen, the work speaks directly without tricks. There's no fragmentation, flarf, call of the elliptical, language tricks, movement and meaning through fancy associations and juxtapositions. There's not even a gesture toward adornment or the raised uplift of the lyric lamenting someone's dead grandmother or in celebration of bees. Yet they come with the force of a sledgehammer, powerfully felt, illuminating.

A Thousand Threads (the Hollyridge Press Chapbook Series)

Hollyridge Press

In this, his fourth and finest book-length collection of poems, Steve Orlen examines, with fearless directness, the relation of the inner and outer territories that define our lives. Expansive meditations grow from moments of profound intimacy: a married couple in their ritual dance of seduction; a teenage Jew kneeling for confession so that he might not feel so alone; a father startled by his young son's adult-size erection. Orlen performs a kind of paradox, marrying a faith in the irreducible wisdom of story, as argued in the remarkable opening poem, to a passionate need for reflection and plain understanding. The resulting poems are among the most probing and urgent and genuine and memorable in contemporary poetry.

Kisses: A Collection of Poems

Miami Univ Pr

Kisses (Miami University Press Poetry Series)

Miami University Press

The Elephant’s Child: New and Selected Poems 1978–2005 offers a generous retrospective from a poet whose passionate, straight-talking poems have been delighting readers for forty years. Orlen writes about what it means to be male in our time and culture, and does so with disarming charm, honesty, directness, and humor. Like the elephant’s child in the Kipling tale, he has an insatiable curiosity about everything: love and sex foremost, but also about the ways in which we understand or misunderstand one another, how we perceive race, class, and gender, how memory works, and how we struggle to make sense of our often overwhelming and confusing world.This is a voice we instinctively trust because of its powerful and easy intimacy and its willingness to spill male secrets. The laughter his poems provoke comes from recognition of our common humanity, our passions, and blind spots.What comes through most powerfully is a profound tenderness and curiosity, a combination that results in heartbreaking, disturbing, and memorable poems. The Elephant’s Child will prove Orlen to be a poet necessary to our understanding of ourselves and our culture.

The Elephant's Child: New & Selected Poems 1978-2005

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

Books by Orlen, Steve

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

A Place at the Table: Poems

A Place at the Table: Poems

This Particular Eternity

This Particular Eternity

A Thousand Threads (the Hollyridge Press Chapbook Series)

Kisses: A Collection of Poems

Kisses (Miami University Press Poetry Series)

The Elephant's Child: New & Selected Poems 1978-2005