In exploring the insane, heroic venturesomeness of the many incarnations of "the man," Rafferty cuts to the heart of the difficulties of modern urban life.

The Man on the Tower: Poems (Arkansas Poetry Award Series)

Literature & Fiction

Rafferty, Charles

Poetry

University of Arkansas Press

To call To call the prose in this book invigorating would be an understatement. Charles Rafferty's stories invite you to damn the collar and charge the invisible fence: there's a shock to the system, and then you have the freedom to move in the world that was right in front of you but somehow unexplored. The air is better on his side of the barrier, bracing and clear. I'm not sure whether one should call them stories or incendiary devices. --Sarah Harris Wallman, author of Senseless Women, Juniper Prize for Fiction Charles Rafferty's stories present almost recognizable scenarios: we meet a man stealing cemetery flowers to bring to his date, another presenting his neighbors with their dead cat, another pondering the arrival of peacocks to the neighborhood. Rafferty's world is just a little stranger, just a little sharper, just a little funnier than our own. After spending some time in this marvelous world, we return to our own, surprised and enlightened, ready to appreciate it anew. --Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs, W. W. Norton Charles Rafferty is a master of the short form, and the micro-stories that make up. Somebody Who Knows Somebody are like the lights of a city that blink by your train window as you ride quickly into the night. And what lights! These stories are precise, each glimpse beautifully rendered; they are alternately funny, menacing, and are both tender toward and unforgiving of what feels like a very particular American disquiet. I loved it. --Ethan Rutherford, author of The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories, Ecco Whether huffing breath into the lungs of the forsaken figures of classical myth or bearing witness to the quiet desperation of threadbare neighbors of otherwise quiet exurban lanes, these brief, fierce tales strike a smack to the forehead, like a branch stretched taut and then released on a winding, wooded trail. --Ian Morris, author of When Bad Things Happen to Rich People and Simple Machines

Somebody Who Knows Somebody

Gold Wake Press Collective

The Problem with Abundance: prose poems

Grayson Books

In this fascinating new collection by longtime poet Charles Rafferty, evocative prose poems insert strange and mysterious twists into otherwise mundane middle-class scenarios. With wonderful intelligence and imagination, these compact, revelatory poems show us what is possible when we jettison accepted devices of thought for methods that are stranger, and much truer.
Charles Rafferty is the author of six collections of poetry, one collection of stories, and two poetry chapbooks. He lives in Sandy Hook, CT, where he works at a technology research firm, directs the MFA program at Albertus Magnus College, and teaches in the Westport Writers' Workshop.

The Smoke of Horses (American Poets Continuum)

United States

BOA Editions, Ltd.

" Moscodelphia is extraordinary. Terrifyingly spare in its language and pace, this debut novel by one of our best poets unfolds into a tale that holds dystopic caution and the hunger of love in two steady hands. Readers of Rafferty's poetry will know he is a master of the dramatic monologue and the prose poem, and here he has brought those talents to bear on a narrative that depicts a nightmarish future with irony-laced realism. J.C. Ballard would be proud, and a little scared." -Andrew Krivak, author of The Sojourn and The Bear " Moscodelphia is a weird and wonderful book, a vivid tightrope walk between surprise and inevitability . While immersed in its pages I felt like I was reading a nineteenth century Russian novel, set in a dystopian future yet written in sparkling contemporary prose. How can that all be true? Reader, do yourself a favor and find out." -Tom Hazuka, editor of Flash Fiction Funny , co-editor of Flash Nonfiction Funny and Flash Nonfiction Food Magda Puzanov knows three things about her world: the taste of angel meat, the perils of loving an albino, and the smudge of pollution on her horizon, which is all she can see of Moscodelphia -- the city that can end her poverty. Magda is a farm girl who falls in love with Anton Petrovich, an albino reputed to have magical powers. When the crops begin failing across the countryside, Anton's neighbors grow hungry and fall back on their old superstitions. It is Magda's own brother who cuts off one of Anton's fingers for a charm, and Magda realizes that Anton must flee to Moscodelphia, alone. Magda bides her time on the family farm until she is captured by a team of "collectors." These men are in charge of extracting the countryside's wealth and shipping it back to Moscodelphia. This includes marriageable girls. Ever the optimist, Magda sees her kidnapping as a chance to reunite with Anton. But Magda is bid upon and purchased by Josef Rabinovich, a bureaucrat rising through the ranks of the Ministry of Opulence. At first, Magda is astonished at the luxury Josef provides, but she leads an increasingly brutalized life until she finds Anton again, years later, in an open-air market. They conduct a love affair and plot their escape from a city full of poison and an ongoing plague of falling toads.

Moscodelphia

Romance

Woodhall Press

Charles Rafferty's latest collection of prose poems turns philosophical. In A Cluster of Noisy Planets, Rafferty captures the rhythms and patterns of life as a lover, father, and poet, distilling each moment to its essence and grounding them collectively in the wider perspective of a changing world, the constant turning of the stars and the changing seasons of the New England countryside. With a knowing nod to the passage of time--day to day, year to year, epoch to epoch--these lyrical poems form a record of the profound, ephemeral joys, losses, and echoes of commonplace moments.

A Cluster of Noisy Planets (American Poets Continuum, 190)

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