Verge: [Poems]

The poems in Morgan Lucas Schuldt's debut collection, VERGE, speak at once both brokenly and reparably of the body, of its lusts and devotions, its violences and "satisflictions." Schuldt's lyrics exploit the phonetic suppleness of the English language in a way that teases out (mischievously so, earnestly so) an ecstatic, carnal, tender kind of poetics that pays homage-in both name and spirit-to poets like Hopkins, Celan, Crane and Berryman, as well as ekphrastically to painters Francis Bacon, Joan Miro, and Hironymous Bosch. ABOUT THE AUTHOR The poems of Morgan Lucas Schuldt have appeared in Fence, Verse, and LIT; online at Shampoo, Coconut, Typo, and Free Verse; in the anthologies Prose Poetry / Flash Fiction: An Anthology, The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel, Second Floor and Best New Poets 2007; and in the chapbook, Otherhow (Kitchen Press 2007). A brief essay on the poet Larry Levis appears in A Condition of the Spirit: The Life and Work of Larry Levis (2004). A graduate from the University of Arizona's MFA program, Morgan lives in Tucson where he edits the literary journal CUE. . . . ADVANCE PRAISE FOR VERGE With VERGE, Morgan Lucas Schuldt voices a radical corporality, raw-nerved and searing, in sleight-of-language play and pure sound as deft and inventive as that of Joyce and Mallarmé. This is a rare and profound achievement: the body at the level of the phoneme, a gestural and musical dance of flesh, and an altogether new work. -CAROLYN FORCHÉ In the tradition of Jacques Roubaud's Some Thing Black and Stan Brakhage's The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes, Morgan Lucas Schuldt's VERGE is a concise and unsettling ride along the boundary between life and death. Through careful lyric gestures and Joycian guttural utterances, Schuldt's poems linger at the verges of the body and the breath, all along reminding the reader that the language of poetry depends upon our "meat-leased" fragile corporeal forms. -LISA JARNOT With its ceaseless invention, root-play, and wit, Morgan Lucas Schuldt's VERGE paces a vaulting "overtakelessness." It is a fast shining careen, affirming "meanings sing us" in its swervings. -KAREN VOLKMAN