Roger Fanning Selected Works

Within Roger Fanning's first collection of poems, the mundane is redeemed: the soft glow given off from a dying man's gold tooth, a plumber's battle with a "family of furtive opulence," and the strange poignancy that is evoked by large underwear hanging on a clothesline in the moonloght. The everyday is made complex and mysterious through Fanning's simple lines and stanzas.

A new collection from a Whiting award and National Poetry Series winner. Thomas Lux has called Roger Fanning "an American original . . . [whose] poems are so pure, so piercing, so simple, so distilled that reading him is like taking a drunk-with-language dive into a moonlit lake on a night you believe you will live forever!"

Fanning writes surprising and evocative poems that are filled with humor and ingenuity; Mary Karr says he "tunes us in to those minuscule instants of revelation that can keep life from being a long zombie convention." This new collection of poems, Fanning's first in more than ten years, in part chronicles a period of time when he suffered a break with reality, and continues his investigations into the drudgeries, the disappointments, and the joy of our daily lives.

Roger Fanning is a junk magician. In Homesick, his second book, he repeatedly drains popular culture of its pop and fizz and transforms it into poems that are substantial, surprising, and evocative. In "Lord of the Jungle, Larva-Nude," Tarzan stands revealed as an adolescent, self-conscious about his lack of body hair. In "Besides Dracula's Castle a Black Pool"—a sly critique of capitalism's excess—Nosferatu becomes "a slender old bachelor with his hair slicked back." For all his humor and ingenuity, Fanning never loses touch with the ache that underlies our daily lives.