Thaumatrope
by Brent Hendricks

Poetry.
ISBN: 9780976569299
1 October 2007
$14

At once a debut collection of poetry and a gripping literary game, Thaumatrope fascinates like a supermarket tabloid and like a dazzling gem. These fifty-two poems are laid out as a shuffled deck of cards, with each suit and number tracing a different mood, tone, lyric problem and narrative or characterological thread. Thumbing through the random order, the reader must build her own conceptual house of cards, plotting connections and alliances between the Jokers, junkies and other mundane and mystical protagonists who haunt the royal parks and seedy bars, lofty towers and run-down clinics of this dense and various book. With illustrations by collageuse Lisa Hargon-Smith.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Brent Hendricks is a graduate of The University of Virginia, Harvard Law School and the M.F.A. program at The University of Arizona. He is the author of a nonfiction book, A Long Day at the End of the World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2013), as well as a book of poems, Thaumatrope (Action Books 2007). He has published in such places as Poetry, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Conjunctions, The Southern Review, and Bomb Magazine. Married to the writer Kate Bernheimer, he lives in Tucson.