Two Men Fighting in a Landscape

By Bill Christophersen

"Whitman knew it, and Guthrie knew it, and Bill Christophersen knows it: This land is yours and mine, but only if we say so. In Two Men Fighting in a Landscape, Christophersen lays claim to a childhood with the doo-wop singers and straphangers of the Bronx, a near death escape under a landing helicopter, a breakup amidst the ruins of the World's Fair, a handful of imagined livelihoods, a parodist's reading of the Great Poems, and a serious and beautiful translation of the Anglo-Saxon "The Wanderer." Then, having made all this his own, he offers it to us, our land, recognizable and right here in our hands." -Jordan Smith "Finishing this book is like going home after an extravagant banquet: I'm stuffed, staggering, but sorry it's over and feeling incredibly lucky to have been invited. The language has made everything I've been told happen right here, not before me but around me, and including me in the action, whether the lines convey words exchanged at a deathbed, a photograph, or a spattering of perfect details that capture the Bronx. The menu includes experimental sonnets, free verse and formal work; provocative responses to Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Pope, Frost, and Yeats, among others; ekphrastic poems that draw the reader into the visual work by both the senses and the mind; elegies that touch on the live core of now-permanently unsettled relationships; vignettes of characters in different occupations, viewed in a surprising light. For passages that, once read, become unforgettable personal experiences, see "Elegy for a Pencil," "Meditation on a Quip by Frost," "Veteran," and the morally blistering "An Essay on Pope." By the time you arrive at the surprising closing treat-a translation of "The Wanderer" that takes you into a medieval mind as if the man thinking back on his life were alive at your door-you will be infinitely glad you were invited to this feast." -Rhina P. Espaillat

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0692495584
• ISBN13: 9780692495582
• Release Date: August 2015
• Publisher: Aldrich Press
• Length: 118 Pages
• Weight: 0.49 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.3" x 6.0"