88 pages / 6.00 x 9.00 inches / no illustrations
David Romtvedt is the author of a dozen books of fiction, essays, and poetry, most recently Dilemmas of the Angels. His many honors and awards include fellowships in poetry and music from the National Endowment for the Arts. A winner of the National Poetry Series, he served as the poet laureate of Wyoming from 2003 to 2011.
“Things happen in these poems, concrete things: a father canoes with his daughter; a husband makes love to his wife; a man watches two Mormon missionaries bicycle down the street. And magical things happen: a man gets a letter from the father who died two weeks before he was born; an angel breaks through the padlocked gate to the Garden of Eden. Inside each poem is not only a world but an intimate constellation, points of darkness and light tied together by gravity and empty space to form a pattern that is as startling as it is beautiful.”—Teresa Jordan, author of Riding the White Horse Home and The Year of Living Virtuously (Weekends Off)
“In Dilemmas of the Angels, David Romtvedt journeys through the whole of a life,writing a world into being where ‘there’s an angel for every little thing,’ for all that is about us: snowdrifts and butcher blocks, the joy of camping in a snow-hut with a daughter on a winter night at twenty-six below, church pews ‘ruined under a rain of machete blows,’ and a dance hall in Zaire that remains open as the bombs fall. There is an astonishing sensibility at work here: wise, awake, quizzical, and joined felicitously to exceptional poetic gifts. The book’s central question is ‘how short life is/ and what is the best thing to do with it.’ Remarkably, these poems provide an answer. Read and by guided by all the winged messenger within, human, avian and celestial. Even the fish fly herein, even we are winged. This is a work for our times, even if by lucky coincidence.”—Carolyn Forché, author of Blue Hour
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