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With a salve in one hand and a burcher's knife in the other, Janet Kaplan offers her masterful third collection, Dreamlife of a Philanthropist, winner of the 2011 Ernest Sandeen prize in Poetry. The prose poems and sonnets in Dreamlife are packed with postmodern language-leaping, modern irony and absurdity, and a poet's ageless ear for the pleasures of the lyric and formal experimentation. These are poems that can never quite abandon the hope that life--and language—are worthy pursuits; but they never offer up easy assurances about the benefits of humanity to anyone or anything. Get ready for dogs that wail and overtake the scene; an invitation to make love on a mattress of ants; and the philanthropist of the title, who dreams that people are tuned into fish. It's "good luck and bad in random but equal measure," Kaplan writes in "Life and Times."
“. . . this collection has sustained richness, an irrepressible energy, at a deeper level. The voice is so consistently free of the usual taint of writer-ego that one almost gets the feeling that the poems have written themselves. . . . Kaplan leads us into each strange corner with such sureness that we are willing to go, honored to be there, and satisfied after each one that we have been shown a glimpse of something rare.” —The Prose-Poem Project
Janet Kaplan is the author of two previous poetry collections, The Groundnote and The Glazier’s Country. She teaches at Hofstra University and Fordham University, where she is currently Poet in Residence.