Little Elegies for Sister Satan

Michael Palmer

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cover image of the book Little Elegies for Sister Satan

These are profoundly beautiful and moving poems full of despair, sorrow, and humor about what can and cannot be said as we fall further into the brink.

— John Yau, Hyperallergic

Shaped by the poet’s long view of history, these beautiful lamenting poems take sudden bracing plunges into close-up views of our apocalypse

Included in the Available Titles catalog

Little Elegies for Sister Satan

Poetry by Michael Palmer

Little Elegies for Sister Satan presents searingly beautiful new poems by Michael Palmer, “the foremost experimental poet of his generation, and perhaps of the last several generations” (citation for The Poetry Society of America’s Wallace Stevens Award).

Grappling with our dark times and our inability to stop destroying the planet or to end our endless wars, Palmer offers a counterlight of wit (poetry was dead again / they said again), as well as the glow of wonder. In polyphonic passages, voices speak from a decentered place, yet are rooted in the whole history of culture that has gone before: “When I think of ‘possible worlds,’ I think not of philosophy, but of elegy. And impossible worlds. Resistant worlds.”

In the light of day
perhaps all of this
will make sense.

But have we come this far,
come this close to death,
just to make sense?

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Paperback(published May, 04 2021)

ISBN
9780811230896
Price US
19.95
Trim Size
6x9
Page Count
96

Ebook(published May, 04 2021)

ISBN
9780811230902
Portrait of Michael Palmer

Michael Palmer

Contemporary American Poet

These are profoundly beautiful and moving poems full of despair, sorrow, and humor about what can and cannot be said as we fall further into the brink.

— John Yau, Hyperallergic

These are poems about confronting the end, the end of one’s own time and time in general, about repetition and the paradox of poetry, its ability to say the unsayable, to exist and yet remain unsaid, the utility of futility.

— Elisa Gabbert, The New York Times, Best Poetry of 2021

A new book of poetry by Michael Palmer is always an important event. One of our greatest living poets — he has spent a lifetime producing a challenging, radically defamiliarizing body of work of uncanny beauty and grandeur. Little Elegies for Sister Satan is a remarkable achievement.

— Norman Finkelstein, Restless Messengers

Magnificent: an astringent blend of surrealism and symbolism.

— The New York Times Book Review

The most influential avant-gardist working, and perhaps the greatest poet of his generation … [Palmer’s] genius is for making the world strange again.

— The Village Voice