Read more
"Sometimes elegiac, sometimes deadly comic, but always vivid and surprising, The Lookout Man embodies the mastery, spirit, and craft that we have come to depend upon in Stuart Dischell's poetry. In a mix of recognizable lyric forms, and set in diverse locales from the middle of the ocean to the summit of Mont Blanc, from America's back yard to the streets of international cities, there is a hesitant, almost encroaching wisdom in The Lookout Man, alternately nostalgic and fierce in nature. The poet doesn't shy away from taking on the big, risky, some would say played-out topics, but the poems never lead us where we expect to go. Rather, Dischell allows messy contradictions to exist in the drama and action of the poems, even while maintaining the beautiful form and music of polished verse. In a wonderful example that closes the book and that typifies Dischell's work, he writes, "I will ask the dogwoods to remind me // "What it means to live along the edges of the woods / To be promiscuous but bear white flowers."--
About the author
Stuart Dischell is the author of six collections of poetry, including
Dig Safe,
Backwards Days, and
Children with Enemies, the latter also published by the University of Chicago Press. His first collection,
Good Hope Road, was selected for the National Poetry Series, and he has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ledig-Rowohlt Foundation. Dischell teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
