Description
Poems of love. Poems of regret. Poems of loss. Poems of remembrance. Poems of forgetting. Poems of sexual longing and poems of sexual fulfilment.
Poems to rattle the birdcage in your soul.
Poems to answer the prayer, the one you thought was only yours, the final prayer, a petition for more time.
Praise for Among the Mensans
Corey Mesler knows how to carve a poem out of silence, to amaze us by shaping nothing into something. Reminds us of the connection between poetry and religious experience. I lean towards his domestic poems, so quiet that they startle us all the more with their imagery. “My Dog and Me,” for example, is like a koan, made for rereading. Mary Oliver might find herself envious of Mesler’s dog poems. Other lyrics shock us with laughter and a fresh take on the sacred. “Joseph,” for example, gives us new perspective on virgin birth, a take that sounds honest and real. Not at all stuffy or affected, this volume is a subtle surprise party for language and its readers.
—Marilyn Kallet,
author of The Love That Moves Me
It’s hard to read Corey Mesler’s Among the Mensans and Other Poems without thinking of Trout Fishing in America. Mesler has written a slightly elevated Brautiganian tome. The river comes to life, the river moves and is borrowed. The river has a conversation with you. These words are not in vain. They’ll move your rivers. They make your lovers come back to life. Among the Mensans maps out an entire life in poetry. It’s full of memory and an acute awareness of the finiteness of the human experience. Let Mesler tell you the story of his life… the accessible language and sometimes just above real imagery will parallel your story. You’ll learn you can make poetry out of whatever you are holding.
—Rick Lupert,
author of Making Love to the 50 Ft. Woman,
publisher at poetrysuperhighway.com
Direct, clipped, with never a syllable wasted, Corey Mesler’s poems in Among the Mensans reflect on expansive obsessions: love, loss, and the body’s perfect imperfections. This is a wonderfully large-hearted, bracing, candid, and ambitious collection by a writer whose searching intelligence lights every line.
—Lee Upton,
author of Bottle the Bottles the Bottles the Bottles
and The Tao of Humiliation: Stories
