Something went wrong
Please try again
Cities at Dawn
Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
Couldn't load pickup availability
- Format:
-
04 October 2016

"Whatever's smuggled into these poemsthe Petronas Towers, Afghanistan cliffs, Lugers and New Jerseyobeys the abstract logic at the heart of descriptive writing: the sweet ease of writing's intangibility, its virtual tease." Adam Fitzgerald, The American Reader
Lush, surreal, cinematic, and imagistically precise, Geoffrey Nutter paints the world into his fifth collection of poems. His poems display a consciousness in awe of all matter, be it organic, mechanical, industrial, ornithological, or sartorial. Iridescent and sparkling, his poems are ornate wonders of language, each their own contained ecosystem and civilization.
From "A Small Victorian Object":
What's that in the mud where the tide is going out?
Buttons; bottle caps; small bits of Styrofoam
that look like shells or coral; a few dead crabs;
a cracked porcelain vessel from the Victorian era
for containing the tears shed by those
who have survived the death of loved ones.
Geoffrey Nutter is the author of A Summer Evening (winner of the 2001 Colorado Prize), Water's Leaves & Other Poems (Winner of the 2004 Verse Press Prize), Christopher Sunset (winner of the 2011 Sheila Motton Book Award), and The Rose of January. He has taught poetry at Princeton, Columbia, the University of Iowa, NYU, and the New School, and currently teaches Greek and Latin Classics and Cultural Studies at Queens College. He runs the Wallson Glass Poetry Seminars in New York City.
—Adam Fitzgerald, The American Reader
"Poems about strawberries, battleships, and elevators begin on track and morph into burgeoning blossoms. The poems unfurl smoothly and astonishingly, 'winding toward a pinnacle.'"
—Jeffrey Cyphers Wright, The Brooklyn Rail
"Nutter is a poet whose hand rests on the rudder, but who is also confident enough to let his poem-ships follow the current underneath. It’s a movement similar to the way dreams progress...where the propulsive force of associative imagery leads each poem forward down the page."
—Michelle Taransky, Time Out Chicago
"Thank goodness for Geoffrey Nutter, whose poetry seems to be powered equally by sunlight, virtue, wonder, and humility...Geoffrey Nutter has handed us a book that records the motions of being human, enacting it in language that leads to a passionate feeling of overflow."
—Rain Taxi
"Like Italo Calvino meets Wallace Stevens meets William Gass with a dash of Kafka tossed in, Nutter’s writing has one foot planted firmly in reality and the other in the fantastical world of the poet’s imagination."
—Michelle Aldredge, Gwarlingo
Class E Ordinary Open High-Sided Wagon
The Lapidary Crystal
Billet-Doux
The Man Who Was Used Up
These Great Sentinels
Canals Paneled with Light
The Radiant Manifest
These Are the Cliffs of Wonder
The Mercurial Wheel
The Door into Summer
Portrait
René Descartes
The Harkening Knell
Apology for Idlers
A Pythian Ode
The Blooming of Significance
The New Atlantis
Common Misnomers
Cloud Iridescence
Botanical Gardens
Letter to a Friend
The Mental Image
The Strange Lives of Others
The Cigarist
Why Distant Objects Please
Voyages
Eddie Desirée Loves Aurora Baker
The Topography of the Moon
Six Records of a Floating Life
And What of Z?
Men with Mustaches
Albany
May I Join the Choir Invisible
Prodigies
My Name Is Dustin Hemp
Everybody Else
Cities at Dawn
Winding Towers
Marvell and Shenstone/Shenstone and Marvell