Sun & Urn - (Georgia Poetry Prize) by Christopher Salerno (Paperback)

About the Book

Christopher Salerno's fourth collection of poems, Sun & Urn, is a book made from the wild stuff of grief and loss. Readers will find in these lyric poems a peculiar force pushing beyond the obvious.

Book Synopsis

Christopher Salerno's fourth collection of poems, Sun & Urn, is a book made from the wild stuff of grief and loss. Readers will find in these lyric poems a peculiar force pushing beyond the obvious. Sad, tender, whimsical, this book mines the poet's personal journey through grief for a universal look at how we as human beings handle our greatest losses. Coursing through this work is the clarity of vulnerability. With an idiosyncratic and inquisitive lyricism, Sun & Urn examines, repositions, and makes art from the odd scraps left over after a father's sudden death, from infertility and divorce, and from the hope of new love.

Review Quotes

In his haunting fourth collection, Salerno weaves a morbid kind of melancholia into the mundane and negotiates the experience of loss and a lack of fulfillment...The poems disquietingly hum with questions of what to do after death--whether one's own or another's. For whatever simple answers the poet seems to have for great unspoken questions--'There are ways to say die/ without a findable body'--Salerno wields just as many queries, yielding a book ripe with eerie and meaning-filled unknowing.-- "Publisher's Weekly (starred review)"

If a poet ends a poem early in a book with, 'And always a hellhound be, ' I keep reading. If, several poems later, a speaker is burning his deceased father's toupee in the yard, I keep reading--harder, closer. Christopher Salerno's Sun & Urn is a highly accomplished (he has learned his trade!), a madly imaginative, and, ultimately, a brilliant and deeply human book. Read it, please, thrice!--Tom Lux

About the Author

Christopher Salerno resides in Caldwell, New Jersey, where he serves as associate professor in the creative writing and MFA programs at William Paterson University.