Stuart Dischell Knihy

Exploring a landscape of contradictions, this collection features twelve poems that capture the complexity of contemporary urban life, reflecting on themes of love, conflict, and personal struggle. The opening sequence, "Apartments," delves into the lives of wronged lovers and idealistic veterans, while the second section, "Household Gods," offers poignant monologues set against various backdrops, including the shore and countryside. Through observant and compassionate verses, the collection showcases the depth of human experience and introduces a compelling new voice in poetry.

Exploring themes of desire and the passage of time, this collection features Stuart Dischell's signature blend of humor and emotional depth. The poems are characterized by their inventive lyricism and narrative style, revealing a balance between grim realities and hopeful perspectives. Through vivid landscapes and psychological insights, Dischell captures the complexities of the human experience, navigating both the sorrowful and the buoyant aspects of life. The work invites readers to engage with the elusive nature of understanding and the nuances of movement in various forms.

In his fourth book of poems, Stuart Dischell is part elegist, part fabulist, part absurdist; or, as one critic puts it, "a lovely, encompassing mirror of our little but to us so urgent human life." Dischell is a poet who writes at the edges of imagination, memory, and experience, and the poems here are by turns socially outward and inwardly reflective, or darkly comic and heartbreakingly remorseful--but always beautifully crafted and unpredictable. In Dischell's hands, the poems in Children with Enemies come alive to the complications and implications of what it means to be human.

"Sometimes elegiac, sometimes deadly comic, but always vivid and surprising, The Lookout Man embodies the mastery, spirit, and craft that we have come to depend upon in Stuart Dischell's poetry. In a mix of recognizable lyric forms, and set in diverse locales from the middle of the ocean to the summit of Mont Blanc, from America's back yard to the streets of international cities, there is a hesitant, almost encroaching wisdom in The Lookout Man, alternately nostalgic and fierce in nature. The poet doesn't shy away from taking on the big, risky, some would say played-out topics, but the poems never lead us where we expect to go. Rather, Dischell allows messy contradictions to exist in the drama and action of the poems, even while maintaining the beautiful form and music of polished verse. In a wonderful example that closes the book and that typifies Dischell's work, he writes, 'I will ask the dogwoods to remind me // "What it means to live along the edges of the woods / To be promiscuous but bear white flowers.'"-- Provided by publisher