Books in the Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series series

"Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Alan Dugan described Skoyles's poems as "clear-eyed but passionate, sarcastic but grave, all at the same time." That description holds true for this selection of poems from his previous four books: A Little Faith; Permanent Change; Definition of the Soul, and The Situation. The title, taken from the Italian poet Salvatore Quasimodo, alludes to the temporal quality of existence, how one moves from sunlight to twilight in the course of a lifetime. And how those evening hours arrive suddenly, as if in no time at all."

"Immortal Village is a poetry collection about wildness versus domesticity, about desire set against the civilizing structures of myth, marriage, school, and village."--

"All hail the end of spectacle," announces a speaker in Virginia Konchan's anticipated debut collection of poems. Sharp, funny, serious, and elegant, the poems in The End of Spectacle have the intimacy and compression that come with the lyric proper. Through a combination of grand persona and personal narrative, Konchan is able to provide us a door into the consciousness of another while challenging the prevailing notion of human consciousness altogether. In this poet's hands, individualities become opportunities, as Konchan pushes us to question our notions of selfhood and its relationship to our construction of the world. A timely collection from a poet who dismantles power structures in order to lament the damage in echoing song: "The idea / of freedom! Someone leapt: / someone else was dragged."