Description: An ambitious collection of poems that reckon with life and death through the point of view of famous speakers throughout history and literature, spanning from Penelope to Frankenstein's monster.
A book that holds death in one hand and wonder in the other, Killing Orpheus explores the horror of mortality, the brutality of history, and the gentle miracles of love. Using received forms, especially the sonnet, this collection cycles through various speakers, including an aging Penelope, Frankenstein's monster, Isaac beneath Abraham's blade, and an elephant in Hannibal's army. Here are sprays of flowers and hungry alligators, lethal snakes, and a baby's first breath. Here are poems that reckon with death, but for the sake of life. Here is a poetic consciousness that shows us we must dare to make "a truce with loss" in order to go "spinning into love's bizarre abyss."Brief description: Forester McClatchey is a poet and critic from Atlanta, Georgia. He received his MFA from the University of Florida, and his work appears in 32 Poems, The Hopkins Review, Literary Matters, Subtropics, and Gulf Coast, among others. He teaches at Atlanta Classical Academy.
Review Quotes: "Forester McClatchey knows that love binds us to a world of loss, a world in which the mundane and the catastrophic walk side by side. In his exceptional poems, he hears 'a humdrumming, a daily beat/that measures us, trembling through the void' and knows that breath is 'the slog of getting the gift. / The awkward, slow rowing away from death.' In that light of that knowledge, he beseeches the dead: 'Tell me how to live. Worm into my ear. / I want one instant of my life to be clear.' His probing, precise, and meticulously crafted poems create those longed-for moments of clarity and then share them with us, his fortunate readers."-- "Andrew Hudgins"