Padua, Jose

Fayetteville. 2019. March 2019. University of Arkansas Press. Uncorrected Galley. Very Good in Wrappers. 9781682260944. Miller Williams Poetry Series. 5 ½ × 8 ½. 60 pages. paperback. . keywords: Poetry. FROM THE PUBLISHER - Winner, Miller Williams Poetry Prize. We are the happy riders on the stream of Padua's consciousness . . a smart, sympathetic mind at work. - Billy Collins. Drawing on the spirit of New York City in decades past, A Short History of Monsters presents the sins and obsessions of a poet nimble in the beat and slam traditions. In this first full-length collection, Jose Padua wrestles with an American dream interrupted by failure, excess, and other nightmares. Often brash and unruly, these poems range from recollections of lost, drunken days to unadorned manifestations of hope. Throughout, the speaker redefines his relationship to pop culture, praising it, skewering it, and mourning it by turns. The poems that make up A Short History of Monsters tend toward both dark humor and epiphany, diving deeply into their own despair and rising up again with existential absurdity. This is a poetry that gets down into the grit and grime of the real world, digging out a space to experience being alive - miraculous in and of itself. This project is supported in part by a grant from the Arkansas Humanities Council and the Miller Williams Poetry Fund. inventory # 44154 ISBN: 9781682260944.