Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Best of All Possible Worlds

The Best of All Possible Worlds

Furniss, Damian

Paperback

General Poetry

ISBN10: 1848614446
ISBN13: 9781848614444
Publisher: Summertime Pub
Published: Sep 18 2015
Pages: 132
Weight: 0.45
Height: 0.31 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

101 poems about power and its consequences, one for each year from the beginning of the Great War to the present day, together making a history of the past century.

All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

Damian Furniss' The Best of All Possible Worlds is as encyclopaedic as it is eclectic, cataloguing the passions and peccadilloes of dictators from Stalin to President Assad, while taking a long and unflinching look at the last hundred years' history of bloodshed and loss. These are poems of great formal flexibility and tonal range; from the rough and ready, scatological romp of 'The Black and Tans' to the tanka-like transparency of 'Blooming Time', the poems veer between die-hard cynicism and deep compassion. Furniss ably registers both our prurient fascination with bodily remains ('Rasputin's Penis') and our more haunted reckonings with the dead ('The Unreturned'). The book's interest in often-ludicrous performances of masculinity and its frequent mordant humour make this a hectic charivari-ride through the past hundred years; but these poems ask serious questions about humanity's appetite for blood, and the place of poetry within this self-destructing world. ere will be a poem about Stalin's poster of Dumbo, as well as a love-song to Putin's man-boobs... and there will also be a poem in which a poem fails to stop an atom bomb. Welcome to The Best of All Possible Worlds; Furniss is an unforgettable guide. -Fiona Benson

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