Paul Guest is the author of three volumes of poetry and a memoir. His debut, The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World, was awarded the 2002 New Issues Poetry Prize. His second collection, Notes for My Body Double, was awarded the 2006 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. His third collection, My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge, was published by Ecco Press/HarperCollins in 2008. His poems have appeared in Harper's, The Paris Review, Poetry, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. His memoir, One More Theory About Happiness, was published by Ecco in May 2010 and selected for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program. The recipient of a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship, Guest teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Virginia.
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Notes for My Body DoublePoemsFrom"Questions for Godzilla"
…what of the glowing spine,
what of the toy stings of stock footage flames,
what of the jets you swatted dead
from the air with unmistakable joy,
you of the plastic-leather, pebbled Pleistocene flesh,
you of the palsied fury, you
of the put-upon by dissemblers and disturbers,
you, what of the life burned
so cheaply into celluloid we are charmed…
Notes for My Body Double:Poems -
Notes for My Body DoublePoemsFrom"These Arms of Mine"
Imagine if each time we kissed
my ear fell off. If the morning
was not so much for brushing
the fog of the night from the mouth,
but reassembly. You might go
out into the day with my bad ankle.
I’d never hear the end.
Notes for My Body Double:Poems -
Notes for My Body DoublePoemsFrom"Hunger"
Let’s eat something no sane person would eat
and in the dark with our zealous fingers
like savages. Each rich subterranean rind
or wheel of cheese we’ll pretend
to fluently call forth from greater darkness
than this. Avatars of avarice, open
mouth to sautéed cephalopods
and crusted crustaceans and bivalves over braziers,
let’s swell until the dawn
like storm clouds, like stomachs, like stolid
hunger.
Notes for My Body Double:Poems
“[Guest] tells his story in short scenes that break to white space before they might prompt pity. He zigzags before we might hold him up as an example, a symbol . . . His memoir voice is gentle and matter-of-fact. His details are astounding and unforgettable.” —Dallas Morning News [on One More Theory About Happiness]
“A beautiful, breathless torrent of language that is dark or insightful or funny or any combination thereof, but always on the mark, always riveting . . . My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge is a terrific book.” —Mark Strand
“To Guest, digression ‘has always seemed the heart's core.’ It is also his method. The appealingly conversational poems in his second collection often start out here and end up over there, although most cover about the same amount of ground (30 to 40 lines) and stick to the same thematic territory . . . Guest knows how way leads on to way—how digressive life itself can be.” —The New York Times [on Notes for My Body Double]
Selected Works
