Repast: Tea, Lunch, and Cocktails

by D.A. Powell

D. A. Powell's first three groundbreaking books

Published together for the first time, D. A. Powell's landmark trilogy of Tea , Lunch , and Cocktails make up a three-course Divine Comedy for our day. With a new introduction by novelist David Leavitt, Repast presents a major achievement in contemporary poetry.

Genres: Poetry

224 pages, Paperback

First published November 18, 2014

About the author

D. A. Powell is the author of Tea, Lunch, Cocktails, Chronic and Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry in 2013.

Repast, Powell's latest, collects his three early books in a handsome volume introduced by novelist David Leavitt.

A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, Powell lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Follow D. A. Powell on Twitter: Powell_DA

Reviews

[James Murphy]

Repast is made up of the volumes Tea, Lunch, and Cocktails. I'm told they constitute a trilogy and together are considered a powerful statement about the damaging toll inflicted by the AIDS epidemic. Powell's poetry is graphically homoerotic, which I accept because I admire his elegant use of the long line and the clever imagery he embeds in it in order to sometimes startle and to make us think. This is poetry which will sometimes take your breath away.

[Rachel]

FINALLY!! And it's more beautiful than I could have imagined!

[Vincent Scarpa]

“I lost the way back on purpose.”

D.A. Powell's poems are gorgeous translations, erasures, and rearrangements of deep thought and feeling. If you Xeroxed the human heart, out would come a D.A. Powell poem. To have his first three books in one volume is a treasure.

[Clayton Greiman]

D.A. Powell holds the astounding ability of transcribing a soul into syllables. His poems are not so much about rhyming or perfect form but instead whispered encryptions of the human experience. Puzzles of less than a dozen words that demand to be re-read repeatedly.

[Connor]

While I've read Tea before and it has some of my favorite poems, I didn't enjoy the other two collections in this book (Lunch and Cocktails) nearly as much. D.A. Powell's a great poet, and there's still some standout poems, but after Tea, this largely felt like a slog through poems that were a bit too abstract to hold your focus for so long.

[Tauwan Patterson]

Touching
Awe inspiring
Verbose
Heady
Confrontational
Unabashedly Queer/
Bold/&
Provocative
Beautifully Human
Wonderfully arranged
Exquisite poetry &
Writing
VITAL

What a blessing to have these three canonical works of poetry placed together in one piece.

[Emilee Nimetz]

Language is the instrument that Powell uses with absolute precision to carefully devastate you.

[Jared]

Good and emotional, even if repetitive