A direct and moving account of a young man's life in a time of plague.
The richly textured poems in Lunch, companion volume to D. A. Powell's acclaimed debut collection, Tea, tell the story of a life; like a conversation stretched out over many lunch breaks. Hailed as "formally innovative, disjunctive but tender and always emotionally expressive" by Forrest Gander, its poems are both masticatibly small and immensely satisfying. The life in question is bifurcated by the diagnosis of HIV; "time splits," in these layered and evocative poems, as the poet's memories of childhood and adolescence are fractured by the knowledge of adulthood.
D. A. POWELL, author of Tea (1998), is a graduate of Sonoma State University and the Iowa Writers Workshop. He has received awards from the Academy of American Poets and the James Michener Foundation. He has taught at University of San Francisco, San Francisco State University, and University of Iowa.
"Written at a time when much poetry seems to rise from false emotion, D. A. Powell's poems – of love, lust, and the physical and psychological reality of sickness – are sincere. Yet authenticity is not their only virtue . . . these poems derive their power from a keen sensitivity to the potential of language to pun, sing, and give us experience, sometimes simultaneously. Powell never lets us forget that we are having a linguistic experience as well as a visceral one . . . Powell's work shows canonical influence – Williams, cummings, H.D., and Eliot most notably – and yet maintains its own predominant voice, that of a truth teller who metes out accuracy with a fierce but well-spoken intelligence."
~BOMB Magazine
""The poems of Lunch [have] the dazzle of double-exposed film, but this style has substance, mimicking as it does the fickleness of memory itself. Powell's formalism is not only distended and sonic, but also the product of a subtly tailored typography and syntax . . . [a] polished yet troubling volume.""
~Boston Review
""Written at a time when much poetry seems to rise from false emotion, D. A. Powell's poems – of love, lust, and the physical and psychological reality of sickness – are sincere. Yet authenticity is not their only virtue . . . these poems derive their power from a keen sensitivity to the potential of language to pun, sing, and give us experience, sometimes simultaneously. Powell never lets us forget that we are having a linguistic experience as well as a visceral one . . . Powell's work shows canonical influence – Williams, cummings, H.D., and Eliot most notably – and yet maintains its own predominant voice, that of a truth teller who metes out accuracy with a fierce but well-spoken intelligence.""
~BOMB Magazine
""His poems take place in the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic, and their strange juxtapositions, at first glance devoid of overt emotionalism, sometimes bring you running around a blind corner straight into a fist.""
~San Jose Mercury News, "Bay Area's Best Poetry Books of 2000"
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