Shaped by his long view of history, these beautiful lamenting poems take sudden bracing plunges into close-up views of our apocalypse now

Shaped by the poet’s long view of history, these beautiful lamenting poems take sudden bracing plunges into close-up views of our apocalypse Little Elegies for Sister Satan presents indelibly beautiful new poems by Michael Palmer, “the foremost experimental poet of his generation, and perhaps of the last several generations” (citation for The Academy of American Poets’ Wallace Stevens Award). Grappling with our dark times and our inability to stop destroying the planet or to end our endless wars, Palmer offers a counterlight of wit (poetry was dead again / they said again), as well as the glow of wonder. In polyphonic passages, voices speak from a decentered place, yet are rooted in the whole history of culture that has gone before: “When I think of ‘possible worlds,’ I think not of philosophy, but of elegy. And impossible worlds. Resistant worlds.” In the light of day perhaps all of this will make sense. But have we come this far, come this close to death, just to make sense?

Michael Palmer has been hailed by John Ashbery as ``exemplarily radical'' and by The Village Voice as ``the most influential avant-gardist working, and perhaps the greatest poet of his generation.

The Promises of Glass, Michael Palmer's first new collection since At Passages (New Directions, 1995), contains seven sections: "The White Notebook", "The Promises of Glass", "Q", "Four Kitaj Studies", "Five Easy Poems" "In an X", and "Tower". These gorgeous new poems explore language and the "salt sea of autobiographies". His work also examines what Marjorie Perloff has described as "the absurdist 'displacement by degrees' one experiences in the post-urban world of late twentieth-century America."

Thread presents eighty-six new poems by "the foremost experimental poet of his generation, and perhaps of the last several generations" (The Poetry Society of America's 2006 Wallace Stevens Award citation).

A powerful, indelible new collection by Michael Palmer--"one of America's most important poets" (The Harvard Review)

He investigates an "active boundary" as it relates to a sense of form as well as, Palmer writes, "to a more social sense of poetic activity as it exists in the margins, along the borders and, so to speak, 'underground'.""--Jacket.