The Life Beside This One
by Lawrence Raab
$19.95
“There is no poet who brings more companionability to the uncanny than Lawrence Raab. The Life Beside This One is full of reasons to be scared to death, but drawn with an exquisite equilibrium where you’d least expect. The door out in these poems is never the door in. This is an art that shows us how an extraordinary imagination can be the crux of a great humanity, even a basis for hope and comfort.” ––Dean Young
Format: paperback
“Lawrence Raab’s The Life Beside This One is a collection that’s all about parallel universes, points of view, lives, and stories. It’s about how these alternate realities can and do coexist—shaping each other, haunted by each other, and often hidden from each other, as well.” — Vivian Wagner, diode
Praise for Raab’s Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts:
“… beautiful, bewildered, disquieting, and full of paradoxical laughter and contemplative solace.” —Tony Hoagland
“Raab’s is a wholly American voice that reveals itself in sardonic humor and reflection as the poet addresses universal, philosophical quandaries; heaven and hell; and everything in between.” — Mark Eleveld, Booklist
“What binds this collection is … his ability to move across registers with consistency and well-tempered feeling.” — Publishers Weekly
“There is no poet who brings more companionability to the uncanny than Lawrence Raab. The Life Beside This One is full of reasons to be scared to death, but drawn with an exquisite equilibrium where you’d least expect. The door out in these poems is never the door in. This is an art that shows us how an extraordinary imagination can be the crux of a great humanity, even a basis for hope and comfort.” ––Dean Young
The poems of Lawrence Raab are accessible yet mysterious, their complexities an aspect of (and sometimes hidden by) their clarities. The title of his ninth collection suggests both the life we live and another life alongside—what might have been but wasn’t, yet remains in the imagination.
“The casual tone,” Mark Strand has written of Raab’s work, “the offhand remark, are not only the means by which sense establishes itself, but also the way it take on a miraculous resonance.”
Lawrence Raab is author of eight previous collections of poems, including What We Don’t Know About Each Other and Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts, both finalists for the National Book Award. His previous book is a collection of essays, Why Don’t We Say What We Mean? He teaches literature and writing at Williams College.
Additional information
| Weight | .4 lbs |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 6 × .5 × 9 in |
