The poems collected here, that confront the inescapable reality of our time, are not mere versification, nor do they hide their meaning behind Surrealism or Cubism or other movements of the twentieth century that made meaning oblique in the construction of an artistic reality. Rather, they offer to the reader of the new millennium a fresh way to organize language and discover its import. No one should doubt that the talent displayed in this volume is a growing one that will make its audience happy to come back for more.
"This semihallucinated cycle of poems proffers laconic variations on themes of disaster, faced down by detachment and glints of comedy. Nathaniel Hutner lives intimately with language in its simplest forms.”
—Roger Shattuck
"Nathaniel Hutner's poetry shows us that there is an introspection so intense it becomes impersonal--a way of registering the general condition.... There is the sound here of what poetry has and must become after September 11.”
— Peter Dimock (Senior Executive Editor Columbia University Press)
Nathaniel Hutner grew up in Middlebury, Vermont and Princeton, New Jersey. He holds classical diplomas from Exeter and Harvard, and has done graduate work at Göttingen and Oxford. He has also been a dishwasher, a lunch cook, a stableboy and an employee of the Strand Bookstore. For twenty years he worked on Wall Street. He now writes full time and lives in Brooklyn.