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Sonnets for a Missing Key

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

AUTHOR OF THE INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER, JAMES • AUTHOR OF ERASURE, now adapted for the screen as the OSCAR-WINNING FILM, AMERICAN FICTION • Percival Everett is diving back into poetry with his spellbinding new collection, SONNETS FOR A MISSING KEY

"One of the most profoundly talented writers of all time."—Robin Coste Lewis, winner of the National Book Award for Poetry • "VERDICT For enthusiasts of Percival's writing."—Library Journal • "Your favorite writer's writer."—Entertainment Weekly • "Percival Everett is poised for a big year."—The Wall Street Journal • Percival Everett puts cherry on top of novels with new book of sonnets."—Pasadena Star-News • "Wry and epigrammatic."—Publisher's Weekly • "A mesmerizing collection that transcends the boundaries of conventional poetry."—Amsterdam News

Inspired by the Preludes of Chopin and the piano solos of Art Tatum, these sonnets leap and turn through philosophical musings accrued across a life well lived, with inventive language, crystalline imagery, and turns of phrase that lift off the page and glimmer. Everett's sonnets soar through the musical scale, from A Minor to A Major, exploring relationships, spirituality, compassion, despair, and how the stories we tell ourselves shape our realities.

Everett continuously defies convention with every creative expression and brings his literary audacity back to his poetic roots with this, his sixth collection with Red Hen Press.

Sonnets for a Missing Key is a mesmerizing feat of language that reinforces Percival Everett as one of the great wordsmiths of the century.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      May 20, 2024
      Everett’s formally virtuosic latest collection (after The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson of Roanoke) interrogates the sonnet form as both a mode for thought and a vehicle for sonic inquiry and play. These sonnets resist pure logic or narrative, twisting and turning back on themselves to question their progression and temporality, as in such lines as “The thrill of it all, setting sail,/ years away, might as well deliver/ the letters ourselves upon return, icy letters/ soaked with, overwhelmed with blood.” In the first half of the collection, Everett structures his sonnets around the Italian model, seeming to relish the diagrammatic strictness of the 4-4-3-3 line stanza structure even as internal rhyme, caesura, and enjambment challenge the neatness of the form: “Tweedle Dee did what Tweedle did done,/ a dumb thing to do, it was agreed. Build a house/ of straw on Paradise Street for a pretty/ young damsel chanced for to meet.” The volume’s second half incorporates tempo instruction into its musical titles, allowing Everett to further contrast form and content, as in a poem with tempo instructions for “liveliness,” which begins with the dreary couplet “A dungeon, a pit,/ A pillow with no head.” Wry and epigrammatic, these poems inventively challenge and expand the possibilities of form.

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  • English

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