Books by Dan Chiasson
Where's the Moon, There's the Moon: Poems
by Dan Chiasson
These are powerfully original poems about the sweetness and pain of adulthood and fatherhood by the critically acclaimed poet Dan Chiasson.
A child’s improvised game of “Where’s the moon, There’s the moon” is the shaping metaphor for this collection, but adult matters of seeking and finding, loss and recovery, anticipation and desire’s uncertain rewards are at its heart. Chiasson makes poignant use of objects and nature’s givens as correlatives for our human struggles: “Being near me never made anyone a needle,” he writes in “Thread,” and in the poem titled “Tree,” “All day I waited to be blown; / then someone cut me down.” In the title sequence, a multipart poem about fathers and sons, Chiasson describes the ways the gift for being absent, a poet’s gift, is passed from father to son, as he watches his own children sink into the enigmatic silences that mimic his own—silences that he, in turn, connects with his own father’s disappearance from his life.
Chiasson is a poet of great grief and love. In this third book, his voice is more commanding than ever, embracing the notion of how small—yet how rich and significant—are our individual stories in time and space.
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Where's the Moon, There's the Moon: Poems
by Dan Chiasson
With “the easy charm of a natural New England oracle” (The Huffington Post), Dan Chiasson brings us poems of young fatherhood, love, and loss that, in his able hands, become existential examinations.
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Natural History: Poems
by Dan Chiasson, Brandon Kilbourne
Dan Chiasson, hailed as “one of the most gifted poets of his generation” upon the appearance of his first book, takes inspiration for his stunning new collection from the Historia Naturalis of Pliny the Elder.
“What happens next, you won’t believe,” Chiasson writes in “From the Life of Gorky,” and it is fair warning. This collection suggests that a person is like a world, full of mysteries and wonders–and equally in need of an encyclopedia, a compendium of everything known. The long title sequence offers entries such as “The Sun” (“There is one mind in all of us, one soul, / who parches the soil in some nations / but in others hides perpetually behind a veil”), “The Elephant” (“How to explain my heroic courtesy?”), “The Pigeon” (“Once startled, you shall feel hours of weird sadness / afterwards”), and “Randall Jarrell” (“If language hurts you, make the damage real”). The mysteriously emotional individual poems coalesce as a group to suggest that our natural world is populated not just by fascinating creatures–who, in any case, are metaphors for the human as Chiasson considers them– but also by literature, by the ghosts of past poetries, by our personal ghosts. Toward the end of the sequence, one poem asks simply, “Which Species on Earth Is Saddest?” a question this book seems poised to answer. But Chiasson is not finally defeated by the sorrows and disappointments that maturity brings. Combining a classic, often heartbreaking musical line with a playful, fresh attack on the standard materials of poetry, he makes even our sadness beguiling and beautiful.
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Natural History: Poems
by Dan Chiasson, Brandon Kilbourne
A unique work of science and poetry, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, selected by Natasha Trethewey
A research biologist at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, Brandon Kilbourne illuminates the intersections between science and poetry in poems that demonstrate the wonder, curiosity, and precision required by both disciplines.
Natural History opens by confronting the hidden histories within the study of biology and its links to colonialism, including the revelation that European scientists used slave ships to transport specimens from Africa and the Americas back to Europe. Across the collection, Kilbourne describes how these histories of exploitation are still reflected in dioramas of elephants, rhinoceroses, and African people displayed in natural history museums. Other poems narrate the intricate work of studying fossils, and a longer sequence recounts an expedition above the Arctic Circle to recover evidence of how a fish’s fins gave rise to the diversity of limbs found among amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals.
Natural History is a rare and fascinating debut, and Kilbourne’s exquisite eye brings the role of the working biologist to life.
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Bicentennial: Poems
by Dan Chiasson
From the acclaimed poet—a refreshing, singular collection of poems about boys and boyhood, historical cycles and personal history, memory and meaning.
Bicentennial summons the world of Chiasson’s seventies childhood in Vermont: early VCRs, snow, erections, pizza, snowmobiles, high-school cliques, and the Bicentennial celebration, but his book is also an elegy for his father, whom he never knew and who died in 2009. In these poems, Chiasson movingly revisits the kind of autobiographical poems he wrote as a young man, but with a new existential awareness that individuals are always vanishing in time, and throughout the collection he ponders time’s conundrums. “All of history, even the Romans, / they happen later, tonight sleep tight,” he tells his sons at bedtime. “You’ll learn this later. Tonight, goodnight.” In the topsy-turvy world of Bicentennial, history has both happened and is waiting to happen; boys grow up to be men; men never forget what it is to be boys; and fatherhood is the best answer to fatherlessness.
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The Math Campers: Poems
by Dan Chiasson
A father and husband's meditation on love, adolescence, and the mysterious mechanisms of poetic creation, from the acclaimed poet.
The poet's art is revealed in stages in this "making-of" book, where we watch as poems take shape--first as dreams or memories, then as drafts, and finally as completed works set loose on the world. In the long poem "Must We Mean What We Say," a woman reader narrates in prose the circumstances behind poems and snippets of poems she receives in letters from a stranger. Who made up whom? Chiasson, an acclaimed poetry critic, has invented a remarkable structure where the reader and a poet speak to one another, across the void of silence and mystery. He is also the father of teenaged sons, and this volume continues the autobiographical arc of his prior, celebrated volumes. One long section is about the age of thirteen and the dawning of desire, while the title poem looks at the crucial age of fifteen and the existential threat of climate change and gun violence, which alters the calculus of adolescence. Though the outlook is bleak, these poems register the glories of our moment: that there are places where boys can kiss each other and not be afraid; that small communities are rousing and taking care of each other; that teenagers have mobilized for a better world. All of these works emerge from the secretive imagination of a father as he measures his own adolescence against that of his sons and explores the complex bedrock of marriage. Chiasson sees a perilous world both navigated and enriched by the passionate young and by the parents--and poets--who care for them.
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Natural History
by DK Publishing, Dan Chiasson, Carlos Fonseca
A spectacular and exceptionally well-illustrated guide to everything on Earth. From rocks to redwoods and microbes to mammals – this is a dazzling visual introduction to our planet’s treasures.
Filled with more than 5,000 species and in-depth studies of animals, plants, fungi, microorganisms, rocks, and minerals, it’s the ultimate celebration of the world’s extraordinary diversity of life.
Planet Earth's eclectic wildlife and endless wonders come to life in the most spectacular way in this monumental compendium of Earth’s natural wonders. Compiled by a team of professional wildlife experts working with the world-renowned Smithsonian Institution, this comprehensive nature book was 5 years in the making!
This unrivaled visual survey of Earth's natural history looks at every kingdom of life. It is packed with thousands of eye-popping, specially commissioned photographs and in-depth two-page spreads on incredible species. The engaging and informative text was supplied by a global team of natural history experts to make this bold visual encyclopedia a perfect addition to every family bookshelf or school library.
From the evolution of nature to the classification of species, Natural History begins with a general introduction to life on earth. The next chapters form an extensive and accessible catalog of species and specimens – from flowering plants to reptiles – interspersed with fact-filled introductions to each group and in-depth profile features.
A True Visual Dictionary of Earth's Natural Wonders
Natural History squeezes as many plants, animals, rocks, and minerals as possible between its covers. This extraordinary reference book from DK Books is eye candy for nature lovers of all ages, and makes a fantastic gift!
Explore everything on Earth, such as:
• Living earth
• Minerals, rocks, and fossils
• Microscopic life
• Plants
• Fungi
• Animals
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Natural History
by DK Publishing, Dan Chiasson, Carlos Fonseca
Just before the dawn of the new millennium, a curator at a New Jersey museum of natural history receives an unusual invitation from a celebrated fashion designer. She shares the curator’s fascination with the secrets of the animal kingdom―with camouflage and subterfuge―and she proposes that they collaborate on an exhibition, the nature of which remains largely obscure, even as they enter into a strange relationship marked by evasion and elision.
Seven years later, after the designer’s death, the curator recovers the archive of their never-completed project. During a long night of insomnia, he finds within the archive a series of clues about the true history of the designer’s family, a mind-bending puzzle that winds from Haifa, Israel, to bohemian 1970s New York to the Latin American jungles. As he follows this trail, the curator discovers a cast of characters whose own fixations interrogate the unstable frontiers between art, science, politics, and religion. An aging photographer, living nearly alone in an abandoned mining town where subterranean fires rage without end, creates miniature replicas of ruined cities. A former model turned conceptual artist becomes the star defendant in a trial over the very soul and purpose of art. A young indigenous boy receives a vision of the end of the world. Reality is a curtain, the curator realizes, and to draw it back is to reveal the theater of the obsessed.
Natural History is a portrait of a world trapped between faith and irony, tragedy and farce. An urgent and impressively ambitious novel in the tradition of Italo Calvino and Ricardo Piglia, it confirms Carlos Fonseca as one of the most daring writers of his generation.
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No copies available.
Natural History
by DK Publishing, Dan Chiasson, Carlos Fonseca
Dan Chiasson, hailed as “one of the most gifted poets of his generation” upon the appearance of his first book, takes inspiration for his stunning new collection from the Historia Naturalis of Pliny the Elder.
“What happens next, you won’t believe,” Chiasson writes in “From the Life of Gorky,” and it is fair warning. This collection suggests that a person is like a world, full of mysteries and wonders–and equally in need of an encyclopedia, a compendium of everything known. The long title sequence offers entries such as “The Sun” (“There is one mind in all of us, one soul, / who parches the soil in some nations / but in others hides perpetually behind a veil”), “The Elephant” (“How to explain my heroic courtesy?”), “The Pigeon” (“Once startled, you shall feel hours of weird sadness / afterwards”), and “Randall Jarrell” (“If language hurts you, make the damage real”). The mysteriously emotional individual poems coalesce as a group to suggest that our natural world is populated not just by fascinating creatures–who, in any case, are metaphors for the human as Chiasson considers them– but also by literature, by the ghosts of past poetries, by our personal ghosts. Toward the end of the sequence, one poem asks simply, “Which Species on Earth Is Saddest?” a question this book seems poised to answer. But Chiasson is not finally defeated by the sorrows and disappointments that maturity brings. Combining a classic, often heartbreaking musical line with a playful, fresh attack on the standard materials of poetry, he makes even our sadness beguiling and beautiful.
Copies
No copies available.
One Kind of Everything Poem and Person in Contemporary America
by Dan Chiasson
One Kind of Everything elucidates the uses of autobiography and constructions of personhood in American poetry since World War II, with helpful reference to American literature in general since Emerson. Taking on one of the most crucial issues in American poetry of the last fifty years, celebrated poet Dan Chiasson explores what is lost or gained when real-life experiences are made part of the subject matter and source material for poetry. In five extended, scholarly essays—on Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Frank Bidart, Frank O’Hara, and Louise Glück—Chiasson looks specifically to bridge the chasm between formal and experimental poetry in the United States. Regardless of form, Chiasson argues that recent American poetry is most thoughtful when it engages most forcefully with autobiographical material, either in an effort to embrace it or denounce it.
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Bernie for Burlington The Rise of the People's Politician
by Dan Chiasson
The early days and inexorable rise of the young Bernie Sanders, the one-of-a-kind visionary who changed American politics forever, told by a son of the People’s Republic of Burlington, Vermont
In this symphonic origin story of an era-defining politician, Dan Chiasson, a Burlington native who had a ringside seat to Bernie Sanders’s development, reconstructs the rise of this American icon. With in-depth reporting and remarkable remembered scenes, he tracks a faint political signal that traveled from the Vermont communes, hard-luck neighborhoods, traditional businesses, and county fairs to the Town Meetings and ballot boxes of his home state, and finally to Washington D.C., to transform our national political landscape.
Sanders, insisting on a socialist platform that hasn’t changed to this day, managed to build a coalition in a world of disparate types: the conservative French-Canadian Catholics whose great grandparents had worked in the mills (Dan’s own); the puppeteers and hippies and NYC transplants looking for land and “authenticity” in Vermont; the developers involved in the era’s urban-renewal schemes; the corrupt old-school Dems at their table in the local dive; and even Ben and Jerry who became Ben and Jerry’s right there in town. Bernie captivated them all, running on the slogan “Burlington is not for sale,” to become the modern era’s first socialist mayor, one who got the streets paved but also boasted a foreign policy and a bullhorn to speak directly to Ronald Reagan.
In the tradition of J. Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground and the documentary films of Frederick Wiseman, this people’s epic shows us an American city transformed one diner coffee, one neighborhood door-knock at a time, even as the analog era wanes and a new digital politics appears on the horizon. Full of Sanders himself, reflecting and raging, hitting his themes, forging alliances with all comers, Bernie for Burlington is a mesmerizing portrait of a politician, a place, and a movement that would change America.
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