Description: Manhattanite, winner of the 2016 Able Muse Book Award, explores, interrogates, or strives within a New York experience shaded with challenge and menace, or illumed with magnificence. It may quest for "a cosmic cause" or for "faith/ that holds for here and now." And here and there, it bursts into song of celebration, love or lamentation.
Brief description:
Aaron Poochigian was born in 1973. He attended Moorhead State University from 1991 to 1996 where he studied under the poets Tim Murphy, Dave Mason and Alan Sullivan. He entered graduate school for Classics in 1997 at the University of Minnesota. After traveling and doing research in Greece on fellowship from 2003 to 2004, he earned a Ph.D. in Classics in 2006, and now lives and writes in New York City. His translations, with introduction and notes, of Sappho's poems and fragments were published by Penguin Classics in 2009.
His translations of Aeschylus, Aratus and Apollonius of Rhodes appeared in the Norton Anthology of Greek Literature in Translation in the spring of 2009, and Johns Hopkins University Press published his edition of Aratus' astronomical poem, The Phaenomena, with his introduction and notes, in the spring of 2010. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including Arion, The Dark Horse, Poetry and Smartish Pace. His books include MANHATTANITE (Able Muse Book Award for Poetry, 2017) and THE COSMIC PURR (Able Muse Press, 2012).
Review Quotes:
In Manhattanite, his second book of poems, Aaron Poochigian takes on the role of American flâneur for the twenty-first century, drifting through the frenetic metropolis at a dreamer's planetary pace. This collection is a celebration of exuberant melancholy, or melancholy exuberance, slick lyric cum urbane pastoral.
--A. E. Stallings (from the foreword), 2016 Able Muse Book Award judge, author of Olives
Like the shuttered diner that used to serve "Americana-for-the-budget-patron," Manhattanite gives us the Manhattan of speed chess players in the park, tipsy tipplers tipping off the rooftops, the night sky bright with city light, tenants, tenements and supers. Aaron Poochigian is the poet in New York seeking a holy aura in the song of gunshots and spiral sirens, picking like a grizzled pigeon through stray newspapers, bottles, bags, and candy wrappers for a scrap of religion. Each poem is a tower growing out of our human filth and scraping the sky with sky-lines, and together they build a city of words. Put New York in your pocket. It's inside this book.
--Tony Barnstone, author of Pulp Sonnets
Reading Aaron Poochigian's Manhattanite is a dynamic, kinetic experience. These poems travel at a fast clip, pulling you along through cityscapes, wastelands, and other vistas. Some of the poems tunnel downward, plumbing depths of mood and memory. Whichever way they move, Poochigian's poems perform with such panache and brio that it's hard to know whether to laugh or cry. I'd say do both--and keep reading. But be warned: this isn't a feel-good book. It's a fearless book.
--Rachel Hadas, author of The River of Forgetfulness
Thoreau once boasted that he had traveled widely in Concord; Aaron Poochigian's title indicates that he has traveled widely elsewhere--in the one borough worth experiencing, through western deserts, aboard "an ultra-modern train/ lisping through French or German woods," and in a Paris of naked bulbs and seedy cabarets. In all of these settings, he deftly choreographs his cast of nameless characters. The concluding lines of "Song: Go and Do It" (channeling both John Donne and The Intruders) claim, "I'll still swear/ we could be happy anywhere." One sure location of that "anywhere" exists between the covers of Manhattanite.
--R. S. Gwynn, author of Dogwatch