Chronic: Poems - Softcover

"D. A. Powell is one of the two or three major poets now in mid-career . . . We will still be reading D. A. Powell a long time from now, both for the record he offers of the last thirty years of American history and culture and for the new possibilities he has created for poetry. He is both accessible and challenging, saying something new, and saying it newly, with each book, yet speaking with an authority as old as poetry itself." --Craig Morgan Teicher, 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award finalist citation

D. A. Powell's fourth poetry collection Chronic was a finalist for the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Chronic describes the flutter and cruelty of erotic encounter, temptation and bitter heartsickness, but with D. A. Powell's deep lyric beauty and his own brand of dark wit. In these brilliant poems from one of contemporary poetry's most intriguing, singular voices, Powell strikes out from the farther territories of love and comes back from those fields with loss, with flowers faded, 'blossoms blast and dieback'.