NATHANIEL MACKEY

Musical, experimental and inventive poetry from the winner of the 2006 National Book Award
With Craig Santos Perez

Influenced by a wide variety of musical traditions, Nathaniel Mackey's mutable and innovative poetry proposes an audience that has abandoned its expectations for poetry and that, instead, is prepared to "enter a liminal state" in which those expectations can be reimagined. Like musical artists John Cage or Ornette Coleman, Mackey presents his poems not as static aesthetic objects, but as ongoing sites of experiment and invention. This is poetry that feels live-- electric, happening right now-- yet it repays reencouter even more fully by teaching its readers first how to listen, and then how to listen differently.

Nathaniel Mackey is the author of five chapbooks and four books of poetry, the most recent of which, Splay Anthem (New Directions, 2006), won the National Book Award for poetry. In addition, he is writing an ongoing prose work, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, of which three volumes have been published; volume four, Bass Cathedral, is forthcoming from New Directions in 2008. He is the editor of the literary magazine Hambone and coeditor (with Art Lange) of the anthology Moment's Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose (Coffee House Press, 1993). Mackey is also the author of two books of criticism, including Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews (U of Wisconsin Press, 2005). He is the recipient of numerous honors, including a Whiting Writer?s Award in 1993 & election to the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets in 2001. Nathaniel Mackey is currently a professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz.