The Afterlife of Objects

by Dan Chiasson

Overview

Both intensely personal and deeply rooted in recognizable events of personal, familial, or national significance, The Afterlife of Objects is a kind of dreamed autobiography. With poise and skill, Dan Chiasson divulges the enigmas of the mind of not just one individual but of an entire social world through a beautifully constructed poetic voice that issues from a kind of mythic childhood of our collective, tortured humanity. This sophisticated debut collection offers deceptively simple poems that evoke highly complex states of mind with a voice that has long been listening to the discordant music of contemporary life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226103778
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	10/15/2002
Series:	Phoenix Poets
Edition description:	1
Pages:	64
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Dan Chiasson is associate professor of English at Wellesley College. He is the author of three books of poetry, The Afterlife of Objects, Natural History, and Where’s the Moon, There’s the Moon.

Table of Contents

I
Nocturne
Your Stone
Vermont
"The Sensible Present Has Duration"
Boston
"The Anatomy of Melancholy"
Paul 1:13
Dactyls after Driving through Nevada
Io
Song for a Play
"The Glass Slipper"
Self
II
My Ravine
Poem
Ward
". . . and yet the end must be as 'tis"
Visit
Anonymous Bust of a Man, c. 100 A.D. (Cyprus)
Deer
One
III
Cicada
Stealing from Your Mother
Spade
Blueprint
Purple Blouse
Matter
A Salt Dish
The Afterlife of Objects
IV
Peach Tree
Coda
After Ovid
Mechanical Wall, 1982
Dream of the End of Reading
Leverett Circle
Self-Storage
Aubade
Orange Tree
Notes

Editorial Reviews

Chiasson is a poet of dazzling intellectual resources and unmatched sophistication. His temperament is rapacious, wily; his ear quick; his range of reference memorable, in part for the casual ease of its uses. . . . [He] is uniquely a poet for whom hiddenness is a profound psychic truth, a poet for whom guardedness corresponds to rather than precludes inwardness.

Threepenny Review

"A superb first book of poems. The Afterlife of Objects is a book of interventions and reckonings. It is intensely personal, but in a way that widens the space for our own reveries, our own re-imaginings. It invites us to imagine ourselves back into the selves—the worlds—we inherited."

Washington Post Book World - Edward Hirsch