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LUCIFER, A HAGIOGRAPHY

LUCIFER, A HAGIOGRAPHY

$16.95Price

ISBN: 978-0-9800289-4-2

Pub Date: Spring 2009

Pages: 88


By Philip Memmer


WINNER OF THE IDAHO PRIZE FOR POETRY 2008


Lucifer is on a non-linear trajectory, revolving its readers through the profane and the pious swinging door of heaven and earth. Memmer's collection, with a few pitches and an unexpected saint we can all root for, has the power to provoke, enlighten and unsettle. The paradox remains the same—so much is at stake in these poems, and so little—but Memmer has managed to give us an original and remarkable passageway.

—M.L. Smoker, Final Judge for the 2008 Idaho Prize for Poetry


With unflagging inventiveness and mordant wit, Philip Memmer's Lucifer: A Hagiography explores the not-inconsiderable span of time between just before Creation and the End of Days, as experienced by God the Father's other son. The cosmos that Memmer creates is both singularly strange and strangely familiar, and the character of Lucifer, a kind of existential hero for all time, instructs and delights us equally.

—Charles Martin

    M.L. Rosenthal claims in The Modern Poetic Sequence that the impulse to tell a lyrical narrative in a collection of poetry has “. . . evolved out of a serious need for an encompassing poetry, one completely involved with what our lives mean subjectively . . . the pressure, right or wrong, is to reconceive reality in humanly reassuring ways.” There is, perhaps, no better way to understand Philip Memmer’s poetry collection Lucifer, A Hagiography, winner of the 2008 Idaho Prize for Poetry, which tells the biography of that other, less-talked-about son of God. This collection from the distinguished Lost Horse Press is an imaginative, accessible and ultimately tender rethinking of a character who looms large in the religious consciousness, but about whom little can be definitively said.

    —Kelly Davio


    Philip Memmer is the author of two previous books of poems, Threat of Pleasure and Sweetheart, Baby, Darling, as well as three chapbooks of poetry. His work has appeared in such journals as Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Tar River Poetry and Epoch, and in several anthologies, including 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day. He is Associate Editor for Tiger Bark Press, and the founder and director of the Downtown Writer’s Center, the Syracuse affiliate of the YMCA National Writer’s Voice. He lives in the rural village of Deansboro, New York, with his wife and two children.

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