Fata Morgana - (Pitt Poetry) by Reginald Shepherd (Paperback)

About the Book

Fata Morgana mingles personal experience, history, mythology, politics, and natural science to explore the relationships of conception and perception, the self finding its way through a physical and social world not of its own making, but changing the world by its presence.

Book Synopsis

Fata Morgana mingles personal experience, history, mythology, politics, and natural science to explore the relationships of conception and perception, the self finding its way through a physical and social world not of its own making, but changing the world by its presence.

Review Quotes

I admire all Reginald Shepherd's books-this one I truly love. From his extensive work with Greek and other myths he has learned a new way to know the world, which means the excruciatingly unattainable is still his subject, but the gap between desire and attainment now produces a new beauty 'free of any eden we can name.' This book feels like the culmination of a major project.-- "Bin Ramke"

I would have to recommend the entire collection. It has a lot to offer, not just to the lover of mythology like myself, but to the poetry lover in general.-- "Avatar Review"

In his intense and mournful fifth collection, Shepherd mixes myth, TV, street lingo and fidelity to the poetic tradition to create poems that elegize a world which, as in the phenomenon after which the book is titled, is distorted and bent out of shape. . . Stunning. . . . Shepherd's rigid stanzas and ear for music in a minor key spread [bad] news beautifully.-- "Publishers Weekly"

Reginald Shepherd's astonishing ear has surpassed itself in these flowing lyrics that look at loss as it entwines through body and history. Throughout the book, song speaks. From Orpheus to Marvin Gaye, it's song that triumphs over pain and memory and desire, and Shepherd makes English sing until it transforms sorrow into a kind of light.-- "Cole Swensen"

Reginald Shepherd's splendid meditations on lyric song and its elusive, illusive mirages-its fata morgana-celebrate and interrogate the craving for permanence and coherence in a world of loss and flux. Shepherd's supreme fictions evoke Persephone, Ophelia, Eve, and Echo; a torn Osiris, an Orpheus who 'plays the Bronx, ' and the dumped industrial wastes of the Chicago River. Fata Morgana is a stunning collection by one of our most fiercely intelligent lyricists of myth and imagination.-- "Bruce Beasley"

Through this collection of rhythmic poems, Shepherd transforms himself into a god of words in order to explore the limitations and acute pain creative beings face when wanting to completely possess their creations.-- "The Adirondack Review"

Ultiimately, what makes 'Fata Morgana' so heartening is in how it writes its way from lack to love: for it's knowledge gained by his journey that enables Shepherd's speaker to declare with such perfect certainty 'We have come to the end of the body / and the body doesn't end.-- "Lambda Book Report"

About the Author

Reginald Shepherd (1963-2008) was a Black, gay poet who grew up in the Bronx and went on to receive two MFAs, one from Brown University and one from the Iowa Writers Workshop. He authored two collections of poetry criticism and six poetry collections, all published by the University of Pittsburgh Press: Red Clay Weather, Fata Morgana, Otherhood, Wrong, Angel, Interrupted, and Some Are Drowning. His work has been widely awarded and anthologized and has appeared in four editions of The Best American Poetry and two Pushcart Prize anthologies. Shepherd received many awards and honors over his career, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others.