LONG DIVISION
(2012, Tupelo Press)
In his seventh poetry collection, Alan Michael Parker aims to surprise. Recombining lists, fables, and mathematical equations, Long Division is formally playful, wielding irony as a lever of political resistance. Here is a writer fascinated by comedy, by sadness, and by the unexpected ways that poetry makes both conditions possible at once. When was the last time you laughed out loud reading poems? Parker's new work is truly funny, exposing the impossibility of realism in a world where imagination is more trustworthy than experience.
NEWS UPDATE...
The Committee on Town Happiness, AMP's third novel, has been accepted for publication by Dzanc Books, and will appear in the summer of 2014.
AMP's second novel, Whale Man, has been named a finalist for the 2011 ForeWord Reviews' "Book of the Year Award" in the category of Literary Fiction. Results to be announced June 23.
AMP's poem, "A Fable for Our Anniversary," has been awarded a Pushcart Prize for 2012, Alan Michael Parker's third Pushcart Prize. Thanks to Sidney Wade for first publishing the work in Subtropics. Look for the poem soon in Long Division.
Also coming in Long Division, look for AMP's poem, "Family Math" which was awarded a Pushcart Prize and selected by Kevin Young for inclusion in Best American Poetry 2011. The poem originally appeared in Kenyon Review; thanks to David Baker for first publishing the poem there.
BUT MORE... HERE'S THE BIO...
Alan Michael Parker has written three novels, Cry Uncle, Whale Man (WordFarm, 2011) and The Committee on Town Happiness (Dzanc Books, 2014), along with seven collections of poems: Days Like Prose, The Vandals, Love Song with Motor Vehicles, A Peal of Sonnets, Elephants & Butterflies, Ten Days (with painter Herb Jackson), and Long Division (Tupelo Press, June, 2012). He served as Editor of The Imaginary Poets, and co-editor of two other volumes of scholarship. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Pleiades, and The Yale Review, among other magazines, and in 2011 was anthologized in The Best American Poetry as well as The Pushcart Prize; his prose has appeared in journals including The Believer, The New York Times Book Review, and The New Yorker.
Alan Michael Parker has received numerous awards and fellowships, including three Pushcart Prizes, the Fineline Prize from the Mid-American Review, and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America; his 2011 novel, Whale Man, was named a finalist for the 2011 ForeWord Reviews's "Book of the Year Award" in the category of Literary Fiction.
As an undergraduate, AMP was invited to join the graduate poetry workshop at Washington University, where he studied with Donald Finkel, Howard Nemerov, and Mona Van Duyn. As a graduate student in the School of the Arts at Columbia University, where he received his M.F.A. in Writing, Alan Michael Parker studied with Carolyn Forche, Richard Howard, Denis Johnson, Stanley Kunitz, William Matthews, and Nobel Laureates Joseph Brodsky and Czeslaw Milosz.
Since 1998, Alan Michael Parker has taught at Davidson College, where he is Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing; he is also a Core Faculty Member in the Queens University low-residency M.F.A. program. He lives in Davidson, NC with his wife, the artist Felicia van Bork.
*********
Writing in the Mid-American Review, John Freeman says of Elephants & Butterflies: "I would guess that Parker's brand of ironic inquiry will keep the critics busy for quite a while. Not since Wallace Stevens has America produced a poet as complex and varied as he is accessible. This collection is a must for any serious reader of American poetry."
**********
