The Loves and Wars of Relative Scale: Poems - Softcover

True to its title, The Loves and Wars of Relative Scale is a community of poems that address ideas of perspective, of proximity-of what happens when the large-scale universe collides with our human-scale joys and disasters. But this collection is not a dry treatment of its subject: love affairs, a dramatic encounter with whales, and visits to famous consciousness-altering historic moments all lead up to a bravura narrative poem about Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, the first person to recognizably see the submicroscopic world. Poems brief, long, contemplative, comic . . . two time National Book Critics Circle Award-winner Albert Goldbarth delivers another dynamic experience.

The author of over twenty collections of poetry and three collections of essays, Albert Goldbarth has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Goldbarth's poetry has been nominated for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He has won the National Book Critics Circle award for Saving Lives and Heaven and Earth: A Cosmology, the only poet to receive the honor two times. In 2008, he was awarded the Mark Twain Poetry Award from the Poetry Foundation. Goldbarth has taught for many years at Wichita State University, where he is the Adele Davis Distinguished Professor of Humanities.