Donald Revell : Canandaigua
Courtesy of Donald Revell and Alice James Books
Donald Revell’s fifteenth collection weaves anxiety and morality into a tangled web, asking how we’re supposed to live in a world where our imaginations can cause irreparable harm.
These poems investigate the immediacy of our lives, what it means to be living, and the magnitude of our own humanity. In our culture of technological advancement and communication, the poems explore how the desires for “more” and how feeding this greed and fear can be detrimental to empathy. Probabilities, mortality, curiosity and the unknown keeps us living (living in the sense of feeling alive and not just existing).
“Donald Revell’s Canandaigua compounds itself of archaic beauty and immediate freshets, of fair vigils of praise and invention. Its dictionary holds the sky for all it is worth and breaks the agendas of waste economies. Gainsaying death, these splendiferous poems invite us to join, to mourn and rejoice.”
Courtesy of Donald Revell and Alice James Books
Donald Revell is the author of fifteen collections of poetry, most recently of The English Boat (2018) and Drought-Adapted Vine (2015), both from Alice James Books. Revell has also published six volumes of translations from the French, including Apollinaire’s Alcools, Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, Laforgue’s Last Verses, and Verlaine’s Songs without Words. His critical writings have been collected as: Essay: A Critical Memoir; The Art of Attention; and Invisible Green: Selected Prose. Donald Revell is currently a Professor of English at UNLV and a faculty affiliate of the Black Mountain Institute.
Donald Revell’s Canandaigua was released in June of 2024 and can be found at Alice James Books on their site here. The magazine’s interview with Donald can be found here.
