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In Lovers of Today, Garrett Caples is his most playful and heartfelt. Here are poems that generously place the reader in a particular poetic moment that is both elegiac and also wildly entertaining. Taken from a bar of the same name in New York City, Lovers of Today is a collection of poetry that pays tribute to friendships including Kevin Killian, John Ashbery, Joanne Kyger, and Bill Berkson, among others, wherein each poem is a celebration of life’s ephemerality.
Caples supplies us with a full aesthetic meal, with alarming images right out of the French Surrealists. He also means what he says; regardless of any implications to the contrary, Caples is writing out of emotion, even well-done sentiment.
—Max Winter, Rain Taxi
Garrett Caples is the author of three previous poetry books, Power Ballads (Wave Books, 2016), Complications (2007), and The Garrett Caples Reader (1999), a collection of outtakes, The Rise & Fall of Johnny Volume (2020), and a bilingual selection, Noches Apátridas (Unstated Nights, 2019). He’s also written a book of essays, Retrievals (2014), and a pamphlet, Quintessence of the Minor (2010). He’s the editor of Philip Lamantia’s Preserving Fire: Selected Prose (2018), Samuel Greenberg’s Poems from the Greenberg MSS (2019), and Michael McClure’s Mule Kick Blues and Last Poems (2021), as well as the co-editor of The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia (2013), Particulars of Place (2015) by Richard O. Moore, Incidents of Travel in Poetry: New and Selected Poems (2016) by Frank Lima, and Arcana: A Stephen Jonas Reader (2019). He is an editor at City Lights Books, where he curates the Spotlight Poetry Series. He has a PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and lives in San Francisco.
Contents
Lovers of Today
Harbin Maxims
Sundial Tone
Travels in Russia
Warm Life
Antinostalgia
Emotional Rescue
Willie Alexander
For David Meltzer
Hairy Sniff
John Ashbery and Climate Change
Barking at Horses
Paris with Suzanne
How to Buy Weed in Paris
A Wreath of Smoke
The Comeshots; or, Variations on a Theme by Gerrit Lansing
Names of the Turtle
Huile Étude
Impossible You
My Lip Filler Journey
Note on the Interior of the Cathedral at Nightfall
Swan Feet
Unstated Nights
Texas Christian Sonnet
White Fragility
A Door. A Stone
Quentin Crisp
Poem for Ceels
“Étage Zéro”
Gone Viral
Plague Journal
Love in the Time of No Gods
Soul Book