Poetry at Green Apple: Daniel Poppick’s “Fear of Description” | SF

Submitted by the Event Organizer

Daniel Poppick reads from his new poetry collection, Fear of Description.

Praise for Fear of Description:

“No matter where a reader begins in Fear of Description, the end is near and a beginning closer. As far as this book travels, it’s always there to meet itself, though its trajectory is never predictable. There is also the ancient lament of the worker/writer, trying to sing a timeless song in an age of ring tones. Poppick’s stop-motion ability to convey multitude in moments is genius—Merwin-like in its sensorial clarity, and, where the poet chooses formal restriction, Keatsian in density and bloom.” —Brenda Shaughnessy, author of Our Andromeda

“In Fear of Description, Daniel Poppick, like many of the most interesting writers of our time, folds the labor of writing into the content of his poetry, stirs it around, and comes up with something genuinely free. The wildness of his lines had me amazed and grateful.” —Lucy Ives, author of Impossible Views of the World

“Fear of Description is a bold book. Through Poppick’s memories we relive that brief window of youth when friendship is the magic audience that grounds us. In a world that seems stingy and random, Poppick and his friends glean meaning from seances, road trips, shared economic anxiety, houses, and shaving rituals. Tears, like the dead, sneak up on them.” —Jennifer Moxley, author of The Open Secret

About Fear of Description

From Midwestern bars to Brooklyn apartments, narrative poems that find millennials adrift–in political upheaval and personal crisis–and trying to find their way back to one another

Winner of the 2018 National Poetry Series competition, selected by Brenda Shaughnessy

These poems tell the story of a generation in crisis: at odds with its own ideals, precariously (or just un-) employed, and absolutely terrified of seeing itself in the planet’s future. Is our contemporary moment pure tragedy, or a dark joke? Can it be both? Cutting back and forth in time and ranging between elegiac lyrics and autobiographical accounts of a group of poets moving from Iowa to Brooklyn in the years just before and after the 2016 election, Fear of Description reinvigorates the prose poem, exploring the slippery terrain between grief and friendship, artifice and technology, writing and ritual, hauntings and obsessions–searching for joy in art but instead finding it in pitch darkness.

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