Books by David Yezzi

David Yezzi's Schnauzer is a bold play-in-verse about our feral need for love untethered. Wild. Rabid. Reminiscent of early Albee, across leaps of time in vivid scenes suffused with a haunting lyricism and humor, Yezzi conjures characters struggling to wake up to the animal appetites of life. Dan O'Brien, Author of Body of an America

"David Yezzi's fourth book of poems considers what it's like, during times of roiling change, to feel like a stranger on one's own street and in one's own country. This uprooting is partly geographic, partly psychic: what was familiar has become as foreign as the fabled Black Sea (the site of the Roman poet Ovid's exile). The emotional pressure of this dislocation pushes his poems into lyric fragments and mordant humor. Home, once a comfort, now hides a threat."--

Like a voyage to the Portuguese islands of the title, the poems in Azores arrive at their striking and hard-won destinations over the often-treacherous waters of experience-a man mourns the fact that he cannot not mourn, a father warns his daughter about harsh contingency, an unnamed visitor violently disrupts a quiet domestic scene.

Like Robert Frost's North of Boston, David Yezzi's Birds of the Air intersperses charged lyrics with longer dramatic narratives. His monologues explore the frenetic pressures of urban life, as a number of memorable characters take stage: the guy who is hired to clear out a dying man's apartment; the actor stuck in an inadvertently hilarious production of Macbeth and his estranged girlfriend's tragic end; and the short-order cook who elevates his work to an art form. Like the birds of the air described by St. Matthew, these threadbare denizens of the modern city subsist on the few scraps that fall to them.