Bøker av Adam Tavel

In Sum Ledger's historical portraits, ekphrastic sonnets, and closely observed lyrics, Adam Tavel's signature fine-grained details and near hallucinatory clarity, no matter his subject, achieve far more than a kind of painterly attention to subject, something more ambitious and necessary. Tavel is showing us the America we have been and now are with this unspoken but omnipresent principle: to look very closely at the faces of the dead and the living, indeed to touch them, lightly, but not to hold them at arm's length. To do so is only posturing, not compassion. Whether conjuring patients in a consumptive ward or writing about his son's guitar while contemplating colonialism's claim on so many young lives, Tavel portrays the complexity and avarice of a country's past and present with a sure command of language, evoking the lyric's great strength in keeping open the barriers between realms of experience.

Rubble Square explores the power of art and the fickleness of art history across three millennia of artifacts, paintings, photographs, architecture, and film. In both traditional and experimental forms, these ekphrastic poems interrogate timeless questions.

Written against the harrowing backdrop of climate change, Green Regalia explores our precarious ecological moment and increasingly fraught relationship with the natural world. Green Regalia chronicles the objectification of landscapes and the species within them, the cultural denial of the body's transient nature, and the aftermath of an estranged father's death. These poems of rot and renewal seek a wisdom free of domination, where both wonder and surrender may remind us of our place in the greater tapestry of life. Poems from Green Regalia have appeared in some of our nation's best journals, including Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Massachusetts Review, Willow Springs, Ninth Letter, Southwest Review, Poet Lore, Western Humanities Review, and Tampa Review, among many others.