Centaur

by Greg Wrenn

University of Wisconsin Press, 2013
Paper: 978-0-299-29444-1 | eISBN: 978-0-299-29443-4
Library of Congress Classification PS3623.R464C46 2013
Dewey Decimal Classification 811.6

ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Greg Wrenn's debut collection opens with a long poem in which a man undergoes surgery to become a centaur. Other poems speak in voices as varied as those of Robert Mapplethorpe, Hercules, and a Wise Man at the birth of Jesus. Centaur skitters along the blurred lines between compulsivity and following one's heart, stasis and self-realization, human and animal. Here, suffering and transcendence are restlessly conjoined.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Greg Wrenn, a native of northeast Florida, is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow and a recipient of the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America. His work has appeared in New England Review, The American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. He is a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University.

REVIEWS

"Centaur testifies to the grave fact that humans can harm each other until they want to trade in their bodies: 'I want to feel alive,' says the man seeking to become a centaur as the book begins. This is a masterful poetic debut marked by lyric brilliance and difficult, yet gleaming, wisdom."—Katie Ford, author of Colosseum

"The terrific, turbulent poems in Greg Wrenn's Centaur seem as much etched as written—acid-exact, black promises on white possibilities, lines and space crosshatched with thrilling precision. These poems will startle you at first, and then haunt you long after."—J. D. McClatchy, editor of The Yale Review and author of Hazmat

"These powerful poems mark the aliveness, suffering, and sensuality of the body. They map out erotic adventures and the loneliness of human need. They flout danger with superb lyric craft. But they don't stop there. Each poem offers a paradigm of yearning held together by a rare excellence of language and music. This is a marvelous debut collection."—Eavan Boland, author of A Journey with Two Maps

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Centaur

II.

Low Tide on the Windward Shore

Promiscuity

One of the Magi

Renunciation

Brother on Brother

Reuben on Joseph

Pontiff

Self-Portrait as Robert Mapplethorpe

Manger

Circumcision

III.

Virus

IV.

Thirteen Labors

Ascent

Camphor

Prayer at Ojai

Mother of Light

Revision

South of Jacksonville

Three Attempts to Understand Suffering

Onto

Notes

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