Description: Alan Michael Parker's latest collection, The Age of Discovery, is a work of enduring beauty, filled with his signature ten-derness and surprise
Brief description: Alan Michael Parker is the author of nine books of poetry and four novels, and editor of five scholarly works. Douglas C. Houchens Professor of English at Davidson College, and faculty in the University of Tampa M.F.A. Program, he has received numerous awards and fellowships, including two selections for Best American Poetry, three Pushcart Prizes, the Fineline Prize, the 2013, 2014, and 2019 Randall Jarrell Award, the Lucille Medwick Award, and the North Carolina Book Award. He has recently been called "a general beacon of brilliance" by Time Out, New York.
Review Quotes:
The Age of Discovery is a devastating take on the ways we stave off panic. Mythic, precise as a statistician, Alan Michael Parker eyes the virtual data, "bottomless as coffee"; the culture, on the cusp of cancellation. ("I love you more with every hit," he writes, both acknowledgment and threat.) Parker lays bare the limits of nostalgia, where "the boarded-up video store / makes sadness look pretty"--the farce that art transforms, and the truth of it, too. In The Age of Discovery, Alan Michael Parker, line by startling line, has written a wry, deeply humane collection for our uncivil age.
--Randall Mann
With The Age of Discovery, Alan Michael Parker locates a new register. Throughout this collection are poems that resonate with humor blending through heartbreak, that sound this poet's singular voice, and that, ultimately, sustain with Parker's signature, enviable imagination.
--Jon Pineda, Little Anodynes and Let's No One Get Hurt